The Asbestos Timeline
The complete story: where asbestos came from, why Britain used so much of it, the phase-out and why it is still in our buildings.
Origins & early industry
Natural fibres, global mining, imported asbestos and the properties that made it an industrial material.
Post-war Britain
How asbestos became embedded in Britain's rebuilding programme and an extraordinary range of building products.
Phase-out, ban & today
The gradual withdrawal of asbestos products, the 1999 final prohibition and why HSE uses pre-2000 as the practical building date.
ACM material definitions
Composition, typical fibres, work classification and what the materials mean in real buildings.
Licensed, NNLW & non-licensed
Why the ACM, its condition and the task matter more than fibre colour.
Common questions
The questions clients actually ask, answered properly.
Material definitions — what are we actually looking at?
Asbestos was used in far more than corrugated garage roofs. It turns up in insulating boards, cement products, floor tiles and adhesives, textured coatings, roofing felts, moulded products, electrical equipment, gaskets and other components that can look completely ordinary until you know what you are looking for.
Our Asbestos Materials Explained section looks at the products individually: what they are made from, the asbestos fibres commonly associated with them, how firmly those fibres are bound into the material, where the products were used and why the material itself matters when deciding how it should be managed or worked on.
We also deal with some of the things that cause confusion on real surveys — the difference between AIB and asbestos cement, why Supalux should not be identified by appearance alone, why a chrysotile result does not automatically mean a material is asbestos cement, and why visually matching products still need to be considered in the context of age, construction, repairs and replacement.
And because asbestos rarely presents itself as a tidy textbook specimen, the photographs are ours. They show AIB ceilings, profiled and moulded asbestos-cement products, thermoplastic floor tiles in everything from ordinary to badly delaminated condition, bituminous products, moulded sanitary products and woven flash guards and gaskets inside old electrical equipment — the sort of things we actually encounter while surveying buildings.
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