Oh no, Pat! The Asbestos monster is on the hunt again!

Last week in Rome, Canada along with India and Pakistan, successfully lobbied to keep a type of asbestos, chrysotile, off of the Rotterdam Convention's “prior informed consent” (PIC) list. To add insult to injury, local MP Pat Martin decided to make a fool of himself by doing an internationally published interview with Reuters on this subject. Here’s a gem: “They call asbestos the tobacco industry's evil twin — they both survive on phoney research and intense lobbying and sell a product that's a Class A toxin. Not to put it on the list is morally reprehensible.”

I guess I must be morally reprehensible — but then again, I voted against Martin, too.

Asbestos is a mineral classification for a group of silicate minerals that tend to roll up into fibers. There are a number of different minerals that do this, which in turn creates a number of various varieties of asbestos. One of the most dangerous forms, the so-called “blue asbestos,” is called crocodilite. I have a sample of it sitting in a plastic bag behind me as I write this article. There’s a reason it's in a bag: it's hazardous. I don't have any urge to inhale or ingest it, as the microscopic fibers, only a few atoms wide, would cut up the cells in my lungs or digestive system something fierce, and the fibers cannot be dissolved by my body, leaving the fibers there to cause damage for the rest of my life. Nasty stuff. But that’s only one specific variety of asbestos.

The type that Martin is objecting to is chrysotile asbestos, a variety of the mineral serpentine (it's green and white), which is frequently used for soundproofing and thermal insulation. This variety of asbestos is generally considered less hazardous to the body, and can be safely handled in a number of ways for construction and manufacturing.
In fact, this mineral is abundant in parts of Manitoba, such as Thompson, where it is naturally occurring in the environment, and people are constantly exposed to it through the mining community there. In the case of Thompson, chrysotile asbestos occurs alongside the very economic nickel deposits, and is considered to be a waste rock byproduct in the mine. This means that the miners and other employees of Vale INCO are exposed to this mineral on a daily basis. Vale INCO Environmental Health and Safety has been monitoring the health of their employees for the last 50 years to look for cases of asbestosis, and have not had a single case reported. They also take some preventative steps, such as ensuring that all employees are fitted with respirators for working in areas of extreme exposure, and air quality samples are taken throughout their Thompson operations. That said, most consider their exposure to quartz dust to be more hazardous than their asbestos exposure. To put this into perspective, “Pipe Pit,” one of the many mines in Thompson, is around 60 per cent serpentine, much of which exists as asbestos. I keep samples of it, unprotected, in my rock collection.

The sort of lawyer-friendly knee-jerk reaction to the word asbestos is typical of a politician who needs to have a cause — after all, a left-leaning politician needs to appear like he’s looking out for the helpless peoples of the world by protecting them from the word asbestos. I have a request for Martin: when you say things like “"We have allowed commercial interests to take primacy over scientific opinion [ . . . ],” please make sure your science is correct first. Would you ban steel because knives are dangerous? Just as there are safe and useful reasons to use steel, the same applies to certain forms of asbestos.

On a related front, I’m waiting for the public outrage when the university discovers that students in the Geoscience department actually study minerals like asbestos on a regular basis. Never mind the engineers that are just itching to get their hands on some carbon nanotubes, or the number of virii stored in the biology department — that’s it! Martin should have the university quarantined immediately! It’s for the greater good!

Troy Unrau is a fourth-year geophysics student and co-president of the Society of Earth Sciences and Environment Students.