The Asbestos

The asbestos lie The past and present of an industrial catastrophe — Maria Roselli Maria Roselli, is an investigative journalist for asbestos issues, migration, and economic development. Born in Italy, raised and living in Zurich, Switzerland, Roselli has written frequently in German, Italian, and French media on asbestos use. Contributing authors: Laurent Vogel is researcher at the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI), which is based in Brussels, Belgium. ETUI is the independent research and training centre of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC), which is the umbrella organisation of the European trade unions. Dr Barry Castleman, author of Asbestos: Medical and Legal Aspects, now in its fifth edition, has frequently been called as an expert witness both for plaintiffs and defendants; he has also testified before the U.S. Congress on asbestos use in the United States. He lives in Garrett Park, Maryland. Laurie Kazan-Allen is the editor of the British Asbestos Newsletter and the Coordinator of the International Ban Asbestos Secretariat. She is based in London. Kathleen Ruff is the founder and coordinator of the organisation Right On Canada of the Rideau Institute to promote citizen action for advocating for human rights in Canadian government policies. In 2011, she was named Canadian Public Health Association’s National Public Health Hero for ‘revealing the inaccuracies in the propaganda that the asbestos industry has employed for the better part of the last century to mislead citizens about the seriousness of the threat of asbestos for human health’. © European Trade Union Institute, aisbl, Brussels, 2014 ISBN: 978-2-87452-313-7 Table of contents 05 Introduction An industrial catastrophe unparalleled in scope 09 Chapter 1 Asbestos – properties, history, and uses 31 Chapter 2 Medical findings and silencing them 45 Chapter 3 The Schmidheiny family and the asbestos business 77 Chapter 4 Switzerland, the land of asbestos 127 Chapter 5 Justice for the victims of asbestos 139 Epilogue 145 Bibliography 147 Addresses of asbestos victims associations 149 Annexes Four essays on asbestos use today: Worldwide, in the USA, Britain and Canada 151 A global industrial success story - and health disaster, Laurent Vogel 169 Asbestos in the USA today, Dr Barry Castleman 172 Britain’s asbestos legacy, Laurie Kazan-Allen 175 Asbestos in Canada today, Kathleen Ruff 177 Detailed table of contents 05 Introduction An industrial catastrophe unparalleled in scope Every five minutes someone dies of a disease related to asbestos. The statistics in an experts’ report for the European Union (EU) reflect the frightening extent of the asbestos problem: 500,000 people will die of asbestos-related cancer in Europe alone by the year 2030.1 These are the statistics despite the fact that processing and importing of the material has been banned in the EU for a number of years. Because asbestos-related cancers have a long latency period, the number of victims will even continue to increase until 2025; only then will the numbers in Europe go down. For decades asbestos was considered an ideal substance – it is, for example, practically fireproof – on account of its properties and therefore was designated ‘the mineral of the twentieth century’. A real boom began in the 1950s; the 1970s were the high water mark when millions of tonnes were mined and some three thousand asbestos products were on the market. The wonder fibre, however, had already proven much earlier to be a killer fibre. In 1918 the first American life insurance companies refused to insure asbestos workers on the basis of the asbestos cases that had already come to light. It was known in the 1940s that asbestos could cause lung cancer, and starting in the 1960s scientists proved that people exposed to asbestos contracted malignant mesothelio- ma (cancer of the pleura and abdominal membrane). In other words, scientists had already established that there was a direct cause between asbestos fibre and this disease. But the asbestos lobby ignored, trivialised, and suppressed the scientific 1. GUE, NGL, Vereinte Europäische Linke, Nordische Grüne, and Parlamentsfraktion – Europäisches Parlament (2005) Asbest: wie die Profitgier der Konzerne Menschenleben fordert, and BAFU (2005) Heimtückische Asbest, http://www.bafu.admin.ch/dokumentation/fokus/00140/01273/index. html?lang=de. 06 findings so that it took decades before the fibre was actually banned. The first country to do so was Sweden, which introduced a partial ban for construction materials containing asbestos as early as the mid-1970s. It took another fifteen to twenty years before Switzerland and many other European countries followed suit. Even today asbestos is still the principal toxic danger to workers, causing the majority of occupational cancer worldwide. For over thirty years different organisations have fought for a ban on the carcinogenic fibre but the results are sobering: To date a mere quarter of the member states of the World Health Organisation (WHO) have issued a ban on asbestos. Today mainly Asian countries and Russia in addition to Brazil and the asbestos stronghold of Canada mine the ‘wonder fibre’. Almost three-quarters of annual asbestos production come from Russia, China, and Kazakhstan. In 2003 Asian countries consumed almost half of the asbestos produced worldwide. This development began as early as the 1970s and 1980s when the multinational corporations using asbestos relocated their production mostly to Asia following the vigorous debate in Europe on health risks. A combination of three factors contributed to the fact that asbestos was phased out at least in Europe: The debate about a ban in Sweden during the mid-1970s; the wave of litigation in the United States; and increasing pressure from unions. These three factors led to an asbestos ban in all the countries of the European Union, which finally went into effect on January 1, 2005. The struggle has taken a full quarter of a century to get this far! Today in Europe asbestos is the synonym for probably the greatest industrial catastrophe ever, whose effects have not entirely abated and are still in full bloom elsewhere in the world. According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), between one hundred thousand and 140,000 people worldwide die every year of diseases caused by asbestos. The countries of the former Soviet Union are increasingly affected as well as China and the developing country of India. How is it possible, a full century after the alarming medical discoveries were first made, that this cancer-causing substance can still legally be used and sold in most countries of the world? To understand the present it is helpful to look at the past. For what is happen- ing today in Asia, Latin America, and Africa happened in the same way in Europe, the cradle of the asbestos industry, fifty years ago. From the start Swiss industry played an important role. The town of Niederurnen located in the Canton of Glarus was not only the headquarters of the Eternit Group of the Rhine Valley Schmidheiny family, but over the years it was also one of the centres of international power for the asbestos cement industry. During this period of asbestos euphoria, Schmidheiny Amiantus AG, a holding company of the Schmidheinys, controlled from its Glarus headquarters the asbestos cement works in sixteen countries with approximately twenty-three thousand employees. And there’s more: The cartel of asbestos cement producers, listed in the Commercial Register under the name of International Asbestos Cement AG (SAIAC), has been head- quartered in the offices of Eternit AG in Niederurnen since 1929. The first president of SAIAC was also Swiss; it was the Rhine Valley Eternit owner Ernst Schmidheiny. The asbestos cement producers comprising SAIAC are part of a particularly dark chapter of corporate history of Nazi Germany: They sniffed out good business opportunities in Berlin. And they did not pass up exploiting slave labourers during the Second World War. A particularly sad chapter of history, for which no one today will claim responsibility. Sad too is the history of shutting down the Swiss asbestos industry. No wonder. Swit- zerland has suppressed the topic of asbestos for years, for it was as early as 1978 that the asbestos producers’ lobby here formed the ‘Asbestos Working Group’ to influence public opinion to keep asbestos off Toxic Substances Schedule I. That the ban went into effect 07 only when the timing suited the industry is due to the success of this ‘working group’ – but also the result of the delays on the part of Swiss authorities and agencies, namely, the Swiss Accident Insurance Fund (Schweizerische Unfallversicherung, SUVA); the Federal Office for Health (Bundesamt für Gesundheit, BAG); and the Federal Office for the Environment, Forests, and Landscape (Bundesamt für Umwelt, Wald und Landschaft, BUWAL). But even today, a full seventeen years after the official asbestos ban in Switzerland, the carcinogenic material remains a serious hazard. For construction workers as well as roofers, employees of hazardous material abatement companies, and even for home hobby enthusiasts. There is scarcely a house in Switzerland built before the beginning of the 1990s that is free of asbestos. Again and again unsuspecting workers stumble across the lethal material and work in contaminated space before the construction manager brings in SUVA to implement the required measures to abate asbestos. According to SUVA, there are presently five thousand people in Switzerland under medical supervision who have been exposed to asbestos, and the Swiss Accident Insurance Fund registers eighty new cases annually. After years of silence Swiss asbestos victims are now prepared to publicly step for- ward with their stories to demand justice. There are two asbestos victims organisations in Switzerland going back to 2002. Criminal complaints have been filed against four companies (Eternit, ABB, PSI, and BLS), and there are a number of investigations underway.

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