Asbestos Gloves

Asbestos gloves were a ubiquitous item of personal protective equipment in industries involving high-temperature materials and processes. Woven from chrysotile asbestos yarn, often with a cotton or synthetic blend lining for comfort, these gloves allowed workers to handle hot metals, glass, ceramics, and other heated objects without burns. They were standard issue in foundries, steel mills, glass manufacturing plants, bakeries, laboratories, and any workplace where employees routinely contacted surfaces too hot for conventional leather or cotton gloves.

The manufacture of asbestos gloves followed the same process as other asbestos textiles: raw chrysotile fibre was carded, spun into yarn, and woven into glove-shaped fabric on specialised looms. The finished product was a flexible, heat-resistant glove that could withstand brief contact with surfaces at several hundred degrees Celsius. Manufacturers including Turner & Newall, Johns-Manville, and various industrial safety equipment suppliers produced these gloves in enormous quantities from the early 1900s through the late 1980s.

Asbestos gloves are among the most directly hazardous asbestos products ever manufactured because they were designed to be handled, flexed, gripped, and worn repeatedly in direct contact with the skin and within the breathing zone of the wearer. Every use cycle of putting on, wearing, flexing, and removing the gloves released asbestos fibres into the air immediately around the worker. The combination of direct skin contact, mechanical agitation through gripping and flexing, and proximity to the face made exposure from asbestos gloves both intense and unavoidable.

Workers who wore asbestos gloves daily for years accumulated substantial cumulative exposures. Foundry workers, glass blowers, steelworkers, and laboratory technicians who relied on these gloves as essential safety equipment were unknowingly exposing themselves to a carcinogen while trying to protect themselves from burns. The cruel irony of asbestos gloves, like all asbestos PPE, is that the very act of using the safety equipment created a different and ultimately more lethal hazard.

Today, heat-resistant gloves are manufactured from aramid (Kevlar/Nomex) fibres, aluminised fabrics, silicone-coated materials, and other engineered textiles that provide superior thermal protection. Asbestos gloves should never be used, and any remaining stock should be disposed of as asbestos waste.