A short history of asbestos: from magic mineral to global ban

The earliest known human use of asbestos dates to 4,500 years ago in eastern Finland, where anthophyllite fibers were mixed into clay pottery and cooking vessels to improve heat resistance. A few centuries later, the ancient Egyptians used asbestos-woven cloth in embalming rituals, wrapping the bodies of pharaohs to preserve them through the ages. Roman authors including Pliny the Elder described asbestos as a linen that could be cleaned by throwing it into fire, and wealthy Romans owned asbestos tablecloths that they would "wash" by casting them into the hearth.

Pliny also noted, in the Natural History, that slaves who mined asbestos developed "sickness of the lungs" — arguably the first recorded occupational observation of asbestos disease, nearly 2,000 years before the medical community would make the connection again. He recommended a respirator made from bladder skin. His warning was ignored for the next 1,900 years.

Through the Middle Ages, asbestos remained a curiosity rather than a commodity. European alchemists and travelers described "salamander wool" — a mineral fiber that could not be burned — and the Venetian merchant Marco Polo reported seeing asbestos mined in what is now Xinjiang, China, on his travels in the 13th century. King Charlemagne was said to own an asbestos tablecloth that he dramatically demonstrated at feasts by throwing it into the fire and withdrawing it unharmed.

No meaningful industrial scale was reached until the late 19th century, when two things changed simultaneously: the discovery of large commercial chrysotile deposits in Quebec and the Urals, and the rise of industries — steam power, shipbuilding, construction — with enormous demand for cheap heat-resistant insulation. Between 1880 and 1900, chrysotile mining went from pilot operations to thousands of tonnes per year.

By 1900, asbestos was a global commodity. It was being woven into textiles, pressed into brake pads, mixed into cement and wrapped around boilers and steam pipes in factories, trains and ships all over the industrialized world. World production climbed from a few thousand tonnes per year in 1880 to hundreds of thousands of tonnes by the 1920s.

The first modern medical report of asbestos-induced disease was published in 1899 by the English physician Montague Murray, who described a textile worker with severe pulmonary fibrosis and found asbestos fibers in his lungs at autopsy. Murray testified before a government committee in 1906 that asbestos work was causing a distinctive lung disease and predicted that the problem would worsen as use expanded. The committee did not act on his testimony.

In 1924, a British pathologist, William Cooke, coined the term "asbestosis" to describe the chronic scarring lung disease he found in asbestos workers. By 1930, the UK Merewether and Price report, based on a medical survey of asbestos textile factories, concluded that 25% of workers showed signs of asbestosis, and the disease was formally recognized as an occupational illness. The first dust controls and medical surveillance programs were introduced in the 1931 UK Asbestos Industry Regulations — the world's first asbestos-specific occupational health law.

Even as asbestosis was being recognized, the cancer link was taking shape. Isolated case reports in the 1930s and 1940s described lung cancer in asbestos workers, but the causal claim remained controversial. Industry physicians argued that the evidence was anecdotal and that smoking or other factors might explain the findings. The turning point came in 1955, when the British epidemiologist Richard Doll — the same man who had just proved that smoking caused lung cancer — published a study showing that asbestos textile workers had a 10-fold increase in lung cancer deaths compared with the general population. The evidence was impossible to dismiss.

In 1960, a team led by South African pathologist J. C. Wagner published a landmark paper in the British Journal of Industrial Medicine describing 33 cases of mesothelioma, nearly all with a history of environmental or occupational asbestos exposure in the Cape Province. Wagner's paper established mesothelioma as a distinct disease with an almost exclusive link to asbestos. It also established the environmental exposure pathway — many of his patients had never worked in the mines themselves but lived near them.

By the late 1960s, the epidemiology was overwhelming. Asbestos caused asbestosis, lung cancer and mesothelioma. The mechanism was understood. The latency was understood. The dose-response was roughly understood. What followed, in many countries, was not immediate action but two decades of corporate denial, litigation and slow regulatory movement.

Court cases in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s revealed that companies such as Johns-Manville had possessed internal documents from the 1930s and 1940s acknowledging the health effects of asbestos and deliberately withholding that information from workers and the public. The "Sumner Simpson papers" from a Raybestos-Manhattan executive became central evidence in U.S. asbestos litigation. The discovery of this corporate knowledge turned asbestos from a scientific controversy into a legal and political scandal that is still unfolding through litigation, bankruptcy trusts and compensation programs today.

The first country to ban all forms of asbestos was Iceland, in 1983. Norway followed in 1984, then Denmark and Sweden. The Netherlands banned all asbestos in 1993. The United Kingdom progressively restricted asbestos through the 1980s and 1990s, finally banning all remaining forms in 1999. France banned it in 1997 after a public health scandal around the Paris Jussieu university campus, which had been sprayed with asbestos in the 1970s and required an enormous remediation program. Germany banned it in 1993. The European Union imposed a bloc-wide ban in 2005, effectively outlawing new asbestos use across 27 countries.

Other major economies followed on their own timelines. Japan banned it in 2006 after years of public outcry following the Kubota scandal, in which an asbestos-cement plant was linked to elevated mesothelioma rates in the surrounding community. Australia banned it in 2003. South Korea in 2009. Brazil — a major producer — banned it via a Supreme Court decision in 2017, though the ruling has been contested in subsequent years.

In 2024, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency finalized a ban on the last remaining use of chrysotile asbestos in the United States, ending several decades during which some chrysotile was still permitted in chlor-alkali production, gaskets, brake blocks and other niche applications. As of 2026, more than 70 countries have a complete ban on asbestos.

Despite these bans, roughly 1.3 million tonnes of asbestos are still mined and used each year, mainly in Russia, China, Kazakhstan and India. Russia remains the world's largest producer, with the town of Asbest — population roughly 70,000, located next to the enormous Uralasbest open-pit mine — continuing operations today. Public health authorities in these countries and internationally continue to advocate for a global ban, so far unsuccessfully.

At the same time, the health burden from past exposure continues to rise. Mesothelioma deaths in the United Kingdom peaked around 2019-2020 and are only just beginning to decline. In France and Germany, the peak is projected for the late 2020s. In Italy, Spain and parts of Eastern Europe, the peak is projected for the 2030s. WHO estimates that asbestos-related diseases will kill more than 5 million people over the course of the 21st century even if all new use stopped immediately.

The asbestos story is, among other things, a case study in the lag between scientific evidence and regulatory action. The first warning was Pliny in 77 AD. The first modern medical case report was in 1899. The first formal recognition of asbestosis was in 1924. The first national ban was in 1983. That is 80 years between clear clinical evidence and the first legal ban, and 1,900 years between Pliny's warning and Iceland's action. Most of the people who have died from asbestos exposure were exposed after the disease was already known to be real, documented and published in the medical literature.

For anyone working in the asbestos field today — whether surveyor, removal contractor, occupational physician or building owner — the history matters. It is a reminder that the people making professional decisions today are managing a problem whose full scale was preventable, and that the remaining job is to prevent the next generation of exposures by doing the work correctly.