Asbestos - Other Criticism

Other Criticism

Asbestos regulation critics include the asbestos industry and JunkScience.com owner Steven Milloy. Critics argue that the outright banning of dangerous products, due to government regulation, is inferior to keeping the products while innovating ways to prevent the lethal effects. They argue that the product benefits are too important to ignore, and instead of banning the products, find ways to eliminate risks to those who work with the products. An example is the suggestion by Dixy Lee Ray and others that the shuttle Challenger disintegrated because the maker of O-ring putty was pressured by the EPA into ceasing production of asbestos-laden putty. However, the putty used in Challenger's final flight did contain asbestos, and failures in the putty were not responsible for the failure of the O-ring that led to loss of the shuttle.

Asbestos was used in the first forty floors of the World Trade Center north tower causing an airborne contamination among lower Manhattan after the towers collapsed in the attacks on 11 September 2001. Steven Milloy of the Cato Institute suggested that the World Trade Center towers could still be standing or at least would have stood longer had a 1971 ban not stopped the completion of the asbestos coating above the 64th floor. This was not considered in the National Institute of Standards and Technology's report on the towers' collapse. All fireproofing materials, regardless of what they are made of, are required to obtain a fire-resistance rating prior to installation. All fiber-based lightweight commercial spray fireproofing materials are vulnerable to kinetic energy impacts that are outside of the fire testing upon which their ratings are based, including asbestos-based materials, and may have been removed in large areas by the impact of the planes.