EPA is allowing asbestos back into manufacturing • Hacker News Board

Re: EPA is allowing asbestos back into manufacturing

#151

Post by cmurf » Tue, Aug 07, 2018, 3:33 PM UTC

xienze wrote: post #78

jdietrich wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EPA already allows asbestos to be used in a huge range of products. I simply cannot see what justification could be made for allowing asbestos to continue to be used in cement sheet, floor tile and brake pads. It might pose no immediate hazard when installed, but it could become a serious hazard at any point during its lifespan. Cement sheets crack and crumble, floor tiles become worn and get replaced, brake pads…

The danger of asbestos to regular people is way overstated. Yes, if you work around it every day for years without wearing a mask you'll regret it. If it's in your floor tiles and one breaks, you'll be fine.

Doesn't matter whether it's overstated, there are laws on the books that businesses and lawyers have successfully lobbied for that require inspections when there is even the possibility of exposure - and all of that costs money.

For example, high rise condo with asbestos used as insulation. Electrician comes in, doesn't know this, does some scraping, people find out, and now the state mandates detector traps be set. Those found asbestos exposure, and that triggered a full abatement and removal for that entire condo unit. Then the neighbors sued claiming exposure. And since that abatement, the upstairs neighbors have flooded the abated unit five times, and every single time the law requires asbestos testing even in the exact same ceiling tested 2 months earlier, just because it was a different flood event. Testing and retesting even though that ceiling has long since been abated. One teeny tiny example, thousands of dollars, multiplied by millions of people and incidents.

And that's when no one gets sick.

Re: EPA is allowing asbestos back into manufacturing

#152

Post by hokumguru » Tue, Aug 07, 2018, 3:33 PM UTC

pard68 wrote: post #79

jdironman wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about asbestos and marine wild life?

Genuine question, if you do not have lungs does asbestos have any negative impact on you? Marine animals either hold their breath and come up for air or have gills.

I would wager that most marine animals would be unaffected. Mammals would hold their breath, and any other animal with gills already deals with fine-grained sediment.

Re: EPA is allowing asbestos back into manufacturing

#153

Post by SeanAppleby » Tue, Aug 07, 2018, 3:34 PM UTC

xienze wrote: post #99

rescripting wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"all levels of asbestos exposure studied to date have demonstrated asbestos-related disease ... there is no level of [asbestos] exposure below which clinical effects do not occur" https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/81-103/pdfs/81-103.pdf

> However, in general, people who become ill from inhaling asbestos have been regularly exposed in a job where they worked directly with the material. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_impact_of_asbestos > Asbestos can be found naturally in the air outdoors and in some drinkable water, including water from natural sources. Even nonoccupationally exposed members of the human population have tens to hundreds of thou…

> Asbestos can be found naturally in the air outdoors and in some drinkable water, including water from natural sources. Even nonoccupationally exposed members of the human population have tens to hundreds of thousands of asbestos fibers per gram of dry lung tissue, equivalent to millions of fibers in each lung.

If you're using this as an argument that increased asbestos exposure has no correlation to negative health outcomes, then you are contradicting the scientific literature for the sake of making a naturalistic fallacy. Why are you doing that? It's just a strange attempt at an argument.

> OMG we're all gonna get mesothelioma from the asbestos that is normally found outdoors, unrelated to man-made activity!

Again, because something appears in nature does not mean that it isn't positively correlated to negative health outcomes and that we shouldn't minimize it. That just point blank is not an actual argument.

If you want to make an argument for your position you will need to cite research that increased asbestos exposure does not significantly increase negative health outcomes, which will be hard because it's well studied and the research is pretty conclusively against you.

To illucidate why your argument isn't valid at a basic level, you can apply it to other things. Cyanide is present in almond plants and a byproduct of metabolizing apple seeds. Does that mean we should lax regulations around how much we systematically increase people's exposure to cyanide? What about radiation? People are exposed to ionizing background radiation every day. Do you think that somehow means that increasing that radiation exposure won't increase rates of cancer?

Re: EPA is allowing asbestos back into manufacturing

#154

Post by resters » Tue, Aug 07, 2018, 3:34 PM UTC

This article is 100% political. The EPA did this due to political shifts.

What makes it eligible for the top spot on HN? Any detailed discussion of the politics underlying why this happened will be censored within minutes.

What are we supposed to do, discuss the science of asbestos being toxic? This is a perfect example of why the "no politics" zealots on HN need to be stopped.

Re: EPA is allowing asbestos back into manufacturing

#155

Post by riahi » Tue, Aug 07, 2018, 3:35 PM UTC

swebs wrote: post #132

wlesieutre wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also from snopes: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/russian-asbestos-trump_fac... >Did a Russian Asbestos Company Put Trump’s Face on Their Product? >A Russian asbestos producer shared a photograph of their product to social media with a seal of Donald Trump’s face and the text "Approved by Donald Trump”.

They should probably also mention that all of the United States asbestos imports comes from Brazil. >All asbestos used in this country is imported. According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the only form of asbestos currently imported into the United States is chrysotile, all of which originated from Brazil in 2017(USGS, 2018). USGS reports that in 2017, the United States imported approximately 300 metric tons…

Brazil banned asbestos in the end of 2017.

https://www.asbestos.com/news/2017/12/04/brazil-asbestos-ban...

Re: EPA is allowing asbestos back into manufacturing

#156

Post by pastor_elm » Tue, Aug 07, 2018, 3:35 PM UTC

docker_up wrote: post #118

xienze wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, in general, people who become ill from inhaling asbestos have been regularly exposed in a job where they worked directly with the material. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_impact_of_asbestos > Asbestos can be found naturally in the air outdoors and in some drinkable water, including water from natural sources. Even nonoccupationally exposed members of the human population have tens to hundreds of thou…

People are downvoting because they believe what they've been told for decades from the media and late night lawyers commercials but this is the scientific fact. Non-friable asbestos is not dangerous, and people who don't work with it on a constant basis are not at risk. Those people who work with asbestos over longer periods of time are the ones who are at risk. A handful of exposures to friable asbestos will not giv…

>A handful of exposures to friable asbestos will not give you lung cancer

Simply not a claim you can make. The incidence may be very low, but it has been proven that asbestos fibers are directly responsible for the creation of cancerous mesothelioma cells. Any number of fibers in your lungs 'may' cause cancer, even one.

Re: EPA is allowing asbestos back into manufacturing

#157

Post by AngryData » Tue, Aug 07, 2018, 3:36 PM UTC

patrickg_zill wrote: post #85

Aren't there 2 kinds of asbestos? 1 kind is dangerous to humans due to its particle size, and the other is larger and is filtered by your body...?

All forms of it are potentially harmful, but some forms of it are more easily broken down and go airborne making it easier to breath it in. It is nearly identical to breathing in ceramic dust, the finer it is easier it is to ingest it and the less likely your nose and throat will catch the particles before it enters your lungs and can no longer be expelled.

Re: EPA is allowing asbestos back into manufacturing

#158

Post by fragsworth » Tue, Aug 07, 2018, 3:37 PM UTC

wvenable wrote: post #125

DougWebb wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We" didn't vote for this. A bit less than 25% of us voted for it, a bit more than 25% voted against it, and nearly 50% of us didn't bother to vote at all. (3rd parties got a small number of votes in the middle there too.) Neither of the major parties has a majority, or anything like a "mandate" about what the American people want. The majority wants "none of the above". If anyone figures out how to get that majority…

The 50% of people who didn't vote basically have said, we don't care to choose. So they got exactly what they voted for.

No, because of the electoral college, in states like California where your vote doesn't matter as much (because nearly everyone votes democrat) the turnout is lower.

It's not apathy when your vote literally isn't worth as much as someone else's, as evidenced by the fact that the number of votes didn't even determine the election.

Re: EPA is allowing asbestos back into manufacturing

#159

Post by padobson » Tue, Aug 07, 2018, 3:38 PM UTC

ruseOps wrote: post #77

crankylinuxuser wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, what exactly happened? The EPA was founded by a republican (Nixon). Yet environmental efforts are now attributed to democrats. And combined with that, is that republicans was to destroy the very org they made? What am I missing out of this? Why did the parties completely change their face?

You’re missing the fact that introducing bureaucracy is the GOP’s best tool in dismantling big bad government. In Nixon’s time, introducing an agency that directly answered to/was controlled by Congress was the name of the game.

Pretty hard to call Nixon a small-government conservative. He was the last of the Rockefeller Republicans (counting Ford as part of his administration). Some Nixon Admin policies:

-Nominating Warren Burger and Harry Blackmun to the Supreme Court, who concurred in Roe v Wade.[0]

-Creating subsidies to turn corn into a commodity crop, effectively paying farmers to grow a lot of it[1]

-De-coupling the US Dollar from the value of gold and instituting price and wage controls[2]

No Republican in any district in 2018 America could get the nomination supporting these policies.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v._Wade#Supreme_Court_deci...

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Butz#Secretary_of_Agricul...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Nixon#Domestic_policy

Re: EPA is allowing asbestos back into manufacturing

#160

Post by yvdriess » Tue, Aug 07, 2018, 3:38 PM UTC

yellowapple wrote: post #39

CompelTechnic wrote: post #11

I imagine that whether or not the asbestos is frangible will be strongly considered during evaluation. Incidentally, I have also seen a good amount of evidence that the fiberglass we currently use to replace asbestos insulation is super bad for your health, but likely not as bad.

Asbestos, stone wool, fiberglass, etc. all tend to have the same physical properties, thus making them dangerous to inhale or ingest. Unfortunately, these physical properties tend to be why these materials are so effective as insulators.

Be careful not to conflate chemical and mechanical properties. They share chemical properties, but do not share the mechanical property that makes Asbestos carcinogenic.

Asbestos breaks down into particles of a dangerous size and shape. Glass and rock wool fibres are shaped differently and do not break in the same way. Glass/rock wool has been used extensively in practice and no link with cancer has been found to date.

A quick search has found a quora post about the subject that goes into more detail: https://www.quora.com/How-much-of-a-health-hazard-is-fibergl...