Asbestos forms naturally thanks to the slow growth of crystals in cracks and veins inside soft rocks. There are six types in all, and three main types of asbestos. So what are the three types of asbestos to steer clear of? Here’s some expert insight for you.
This version of the killer mineral comes with a fibrous texture and a natural white colour. Chrysotile white asbestos is the most common across the globe. It’s about as hard as one of your fingernails but it’s horribly crumbly, easily degrading into minute fibrous strands made up of smaller bundles of even smaller fibres called fibrils, easily small enough to breathe in without noticing.
Chrysotile asbestos comes with a high tensile strength and it’s very flexible. It’s really good at resisting and ‘adsorbing’ heat, electricity and sound, ‘adsorbing’ describing the way a material attracts then holds other materials. It also resists degradation by chemicals, biological substances, and heat. These properties mean it was frequently used to make woven fire resistant cloth as well as roofing products, cement, and brake pads for cars and other vehicles.
Any level of exposure at all can lead to serious health problems including Asbestosis, Pleural disease, mesothelioma, and lung cancer.
Amosite Brown Asbestos is naturally brown in colour. It has the same strength, flexibility and other properties as white asbestos. It’s stronger and coarser than the white version, so was mostly used to make rigid boards like Asbestos Insulation Board, sometimes mixed with white asbestos. It’s commonly found in old sheet cement, brake pads in vehicles, roofing materials, and insulation for pipes.
Amosite comes with the self-same medical risks as white asbestos but, having sharp fibres, it’s the second most dangerous. When you breathe the tiny fibres in, your body can’t get rid of them. Once they embed themselves in your lungs, there’s no way to get them out again. Breathing in just one fibre can cause deadly illness.
Crocidolite Blue Asbestos is also fibrous, and in nature it’s distinctly blue. Again it comes with the same set of features that once made the other types of asbestos so useful. But this version was mostly used for insulation, things like spray coatings, pipe insulation products, cement, ceiling tiles, and insulating board.
Blue asbestos is more dangerous as the others, also at the heart of awful illnesses like mesothelioma and lung cancer. The difference is in the fibres, which in the case of blue asbestos are both sharp and barbed. Breathe them in and they stay there, impossible to remove.
We provide professional asbestos recognition training, a great idea when you’re likely to run across asbestos at work. It’s basic essential asbestos training, designed to reveal the risks and how to avoid them. At the end of the course your people will know how to keep themselves and others safe from asbestos, in compliance with UK health and safety law. We also find it, identify it, and remove it.
