Origins of Asbestos Product Identification

After the Asbestos Hazard Emergency Response Act (AHERA) was signed into law in 1986 to address the problem of asbestos in the nation’s school buildings, several school systems and state attorney generals sued the manufacturers of asbestos-containing building materials (ACBMs) to get money to pay for removal of the materials from their buildings. While the manufacturers of some ACBMs could be determined from sales receipts and building specifications, the provenance of many products, such as sprayed-on fire proofing, acoustical plaster, pipe insulation, ceiling tiles, and floor tiles, required a compositional analysis by microscopy and comparison with known exemplars or manufacturers’ formulae. In one of the first cases, the attorney general of the state of Maryland obtained through court order thousands of pages of formula documents from former asbestos product manufacturers. These documents had been redacted, and the name of each company had been replaced with a specific code number. In addition, the Maryland attorney general had obtained several samples of product materials for which the manufacturer was known; these were also coded. Although it was a daunting task to organize the thousands of pages of information in a way that it could be used efficiently, it soon became apparent that the majority of the products could be classified based of the type of asbestos present and which of about two dozen additives, binders, and fillers were used to construct the products. Ultimately, a spreadsheet database was constructed with columns for the code number information of the product, the dates it was manufactured, columns related to the type of asbestos (chrysotile, amosite, crocidolite), and the percentages of 20 possible constituents. In a few situations where two products were virtually identical, a small amount of different additives such as their surfactants could be used to differentiate the two. Eventually, through other cases — including those of the attorney generals of Massachusetts, Hawaii, West Virginia, and Illinois — and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) public documents and court documents published by legal groups, information was released that linked a specific manufacturer with particular formula information. The authors of this study were able to construct a comprehensive database of the ACBM product compositions. This database was then used with microscopical analysis and chemical testing to identify the manufacturer of the majority of ACBMs. The development of the database could not have been accomplished without an extensive investigation into brand names and industrywide or company-specific terms to identify each of the components listed on a company’s batch production sheet. This led to “A Dictionary of Terms Related to Additives Found in Asbestos Building Products,” published in The Microscope in 1999.