Our latest investigation hears powerful accounts from two workers who, decades apart, worked alongside asbestos on the London Underground.

Concerns about asbestos exposure among Underground workers go back almost a century. In 1932, an MP asked the Home Secretary “if he is advised that the precautions taken to prevent fatal lung diseases in workers lining London tubes with asbestos are adequate?”

We know a lot more about the dangers of even brief asbestos exposures now, and an increasing number of former Underground workers have been diagnosed with asbestos diseases.

So why does asbestos remain a problem for London Underground workers today?

Read the full story here

Turner & Newall in Africa

It’s been a busy couple of months for Confront.

Already this year we’ve partnered with Inhlase (Eswatini) and Newsday (in Zimbabwe) for stories about asbestos dumps, disease, and compensation.

Our investigation into tiny amounts of compensation that went to Turner & Newall’s African workforce was also picked up by The Africa Report. You can read their story here.

Of note is that Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Mines and Mining Development declined to comment when we approached them in June. We understood there were no plans to take any action, and the Mines Minister confirmed this to The Africa Report: there are no plans to clean up millions of tonnes of asbestos dumps in Zimbabwe.

Private Eye also covered our investigation, which is fitting as one of their reporters visited Zimbabwe’s asbestos mines in 1980.

At the time, they reported that:
- "No one has ever told us that", said one worker when asked what they knew about the health hazards of asbestos.
- “Many people complain about difficulties in breathing and pains in the chest”, said one miner. “If you cannot work you have to leave, and if you are sick then you don’t get paid.”
- "If you start talking (about unions) you are sacked."
- Turner & Newall was one of 33 companies found to be paying some African workers below subsistence-level wages.

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Thank you to those of you who are paying subscribers. We’re a very small outfit, so every subscription or one-off donation helps enormously.

We expect to have some exciting news to share with you in the next newsletter about other collaborations too.

Our latest investigation reveals that Turner & Newall’s asbestos-exposed African workforce have received negligible compensation from an asbestos trust designed to compensate people with asbestos diseases.

Turner & Newall was the largest asbestos company in the UK. It owned asbestos mines that produced over 10 million tonnes of asbestos in South Africa, Eswatini, and Zimbabwe, around 5% of all asbestos ever mined. It also owned several large factories producing asbestos products in Zimbabwe, Zambia, South Africa, Botswana and Nigeria.

Yet our investigation details that the T&N Asbestos Trustee Company, formed after Turner & Newall went into administration in 2001, has only compensated 101 people from Turner & Newall’s operations in Africa. It appears another claim was received and not settled, bringing the total to 102 claims.

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These claimants received £191,000, according to the trust’s annual reports, about 0.15% of the total compensation paid out by the trust. The trust hasn’t received a claim from Africa since 2009.

All of the settled claims relate to one mine, Havelock Mine in Eswatini.

It appears that nobody from Zimbabwe, where tens of thousands of people worked for T&N in the decades prior to it closing, has ever been compensated.

It bizarrely means that leading British universities have received more claims and paid out more in compensation than the T&N Asbestos Trust, as last year we found 103+ claims linked to asbestos exposure against 43 universities and several million paid out in compensation.

How did this happen? Read our latest investigation:

Read the full story on Confront

Asbestos dumps, toxic dust, and broken promises in Zimbabwe

We have also investigated the health and environmental dangers posed by asbestos dumps in two of Zimbabwe’s former asbestos mining towns, Zvishavane and Mashava.

These asbestos mines were once owned by the British company Turner & Newall. We’ve previously reported on one of their former mines in Eswatini, but the contamination in Zvishavane and Mashava appears even greater. An estimated 143 million tonnes of asbestos tailings, much of it uncontained and uncovered, litter an area up to 2,600km2.

We found that people live and work metres away from these asbestos tailings with no warnings of the risks, the government seemingly has no plan to rehabilitate them any time soon, and the health system is ill-equipped to diagnose asbestos-related diseases.

Read the full story

We give all of our content away for free and try to reach the widest possible audience. So we were really pleased to work with Newsday, one of Zimbabwe’s largest newspapers, who cross-published this story in their Sunday paper, The Standard.

Earth Island Journal also picked up the story.

Stories like this aren’t quick, easy, or cheap.

So if you want to help us do more work like these, please consider funding our investigations and become a paid subscriber today. And thank you to those who are already supporting us.

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He says he was exposed to asbestos while at work, particularly during an asbestos-removal project in 2013.

Now, John is dying from mesothelioma. His compensation claim against his employer, however, has been unsuccessful (TfL denied liability).

In part, this is due to recent rulings that are making it more difficult for workers like John (we have changed his name to protect his privacy) to obtain settlements from their employers.

Given the extent of asbestos contamination still across UK buildings, and the long latency period between exposure to asbestos and a disease developing, these rulings could impact thousands of people.

Asbestos contamination in the London Underground is far from a historic issue.

Freedom of Information Act requests filed by Confront found that there are tens of thousands of asbestos-containing materials still on the London Underground network.

The top five stations with the highest number of asbestos-containing materials lie on the Jubilee Line extension built in the 1970s.

By this time, the asbestos industry had known for several years that asbestos exposure could cause mesothelioma, as well as lung cancer and asbestosis. Yet asbestos production continued in the UK, contributing to the UK’s enormous death toll from asbestos each year, over 5,000 people.

Read the full story

An ex-worker at the University of Manchester has also contracted mesothelioma from asbestos exposure.

Last year we reported that the university, one of the largest in the UK by size, had already seen 22 prior claims relating to asbestos exposure. It didn’t disclose how many were settled or how much compensation was paid out.

In this case, the University settled for £400,000. The former employee said taking action was about accountability, not just compensation. “I know I’m not the only one put at risk,” he said. “Other workers and students have been exposed in these buildings. I’m speaking out because this should never have been allowed to happen, and it must not keep happening.”

Read the full story

Investigating systemic industrial harm

Confront started not as a ready-made platform, but as something that would evolve as it grew and found its feet.

It’s been over a year now. Our deep-dive stories on asbestos contamination in universities brought about increased awareness among workers and unions. Our series on the asbestos mining waste in Eswatini, cross-published with Inhlase, broke new ground on a long under-reported issue. And our story on the ongoing asbestos industry in India showed just how persistent the surviving asbestos industry continues to be.

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So we’ve finetuned what we want Confront to be going forward. That is, an investigative journalism organisation committed to investigating systemic industrial harm across the planet. We explain more here. It’s an ambitious task, but the need has never been greater.

We’re a small team, so we will continue to do this by looking, in depth, at one industry at a time. For now, we are continuing to publish on the asbestos industry and its harms, but we will be introducing investigations into another industry later in the year.

There are some exciting plans in the coming months, both in terms of collaborations with other media partners, our own stories, and also taking some big steps to reach larger audiences.

As the first people who signed up to support Confront, thank you. If you are able to contribute financially, I can guarantee that every paid subscription means a great deal to us.

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‘Bad Dust’ examines the history of asbestos in the United Kingdom. Its author, Tom White, lost his grandfather to mesothelioma while he was still in primary school. In this must-read book on asbestos, he traces the history of the industry from the 19th century to modern times.

Our in-depth interview with White explores the origins of the asbestos imported from South Africa, the dangers employees faced from going into work, the feebleness of some larger unions in protecting their workers, and government inaction, contributing to the UK’s enormous death toll from asbestos – one of the highest in the world.

White also lays out how the dangers posed by asbestos persist today; in schools, hospitals, homes, and office buildings.

READ: The UK's asbestos disaster

Confront published, alongside Inhlase (an Eswatini investigative journalism publication), a deep-dive on the impact of the asbestos industry in the Bulembu area last year.

Our story looked heavily at the British company Turner & Newall, which operated Havelock asbestos mine in Eswatini, one of the largest in Africa. The mine shut 25 years ago, but severe asbestos contamination remains.

Now, we have published a follow-up story, once again in collaboration with Inhlase. We further detail the environmental damage in the area, and how Eswatini civil society groups are calling for action to be taken to finally address the asbestos contamination.

READ: Eswatini's asbestos contamination

Confront update: In 2025, as well as publishing all our stories on our website, we were able to get our stories into trade, local, national and international media. We want to share our stories widely, but we have much more work to do in 2026.

So in the coming months, we’ll be publishing more frequently, exploring new regions, and hopefully getting more visibility for our stories with other media partners.

Meanwhile, thank you to every subscriber and reader of Confront. We really appreciate everyone who reads, shares, or funds our stories.

The university withheld key documents regarding its asbestos management for nearly a year. Confront filed a complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office, and we are now able to publish our findings. The story has also been picked up by The Oxford Mail.

These documents reveal that the university was in breach of asbestos regulations, while the university also could not confirm it was compliant with these regulations today.

Read the full story

Barry Castleman’s book, Asbestos: Medical and legal aspects, is an extensive record of what different corporations knew, and when, about the dangers of asbestos exposure in the USA.

Castleman has been involved in researching asbestos litigation for over 40 years. In this extensive Q&A with Confront, he shares some of his key findings, drawn from documents uncovered during asbestos litigation.

This covers not just companies within the asbestos industry, but major corporations in other industries, including Alcoa, Ford, and Bendix.

Read the Q&A here

Finally, our investigation into the asbestos legacy left by Turner & Newall in Eswatini is mentioned in GIJN Africa’s newsletter as one of the Stories of the Month.

You can read the full story over at confrontpower.org.

Thank you again for your support, and if you’ve not yet joined as a paid subscriber, then please do consider it.

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Our investigation into the legacy of Turner & Newall in Africa is now live on Confront.

You can read the full story here.

Our story found:

• Havelock asbestos mine was owned and run for over 50 years by British company Turner & Newall. Millions of tons of asbestos waste, much of it uncontained, continue to plague the town of Bulembu, years after the nearby mine closed.

• Multiple residents and ex-mine workers living nearby who appeared to have asbestos diseases, yet Eswatini lacks the capacity to adequately diagnose or treat their conditions.

• A report seen by Confront stated that climate change risks that the asbestos waste, at its peak towering 180m into the air, could collapse. However, there is still no current plan by government to mitigate the risk.

• Ambiguities around how a UK-based trust, established after Turner & Newall went bankrupt, have been compensating people with asbestos diseases in southern Africa.

This story was a milestone for Confront. It was our first cross-border story, working with Eswatini journalist Nokukhanya Musi to produce this story.

It was also the first time we cross-published the story with a local partner, Global Investigative Journalism Network member the Inhlase Centre for Investigative Journalism in Eswatini, and the IJHub in Southern Africa.

You can read the full story here.

We’re entering the world of Facebook and Instagram, as we will shortly begin publishing more video content. You can find our accounts below.

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I also want to say thank you for your support. And if you’ve not yet become a paid subscriber, there are several options to do so. This allows us to continue producing original and costly stories like this.

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Our story profiles Daniel Pineda and Ana Cecilia Niño, a couple who fought through personal heartache to campaign for the prohibition of asbestos in Colombia, leading to its ban in 2021. However, challenges remain for dealing with the enormous amount of asbestos waste and contamination spread across the country. Read the full story: https://confrontpower.org/colombia-asbestos-campaign/

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“One in ten”

This is the number of carpenters who were born in the 1940s who are expected to die from asbestos diseases in the UK.

Our story looks at the life of Denis Brown, who worked as a carpenter until 1976 but was never told of the dangers of asbestos. Decades later, he was diagnosed with mesothelioma.

Read the full story: https://confrontpower.org/how-asbestos-killed-thousands-of-british-carpenters/

Asbestos in cigarettes, fake snow, basketball boards…

Finally, we collaborated with Asbestorama to produce a photo essay on different asbestos-containing materials over the decades.

The sheer volume and variety of asbestos products produced can still cause challenges for asbestos surveyors today: https://confrontpower.org/asbestos-photo-essay/

According to the late Lundy Braun, a Professor Emerita of both Medical Science and Africana Studies at Brown University in the United States, efforts by the asbestos industry to protect its business interests were a major factor.

“Many people had written very straightforwardly, ‘the industry is terrible’”, Braun told Confront. The asbestos industry suppressed information, manipulated research, and waged public relations campaigns downplaying the risks of asbestos for a century. But for Braun, “it wasn’t the whole story.”

Confront spoke with Professor Braun in 2024, a few months before she died in an accident. Braun trained as a pathologist and began incorporating social science perspectives into her later work on racialized health disparities. In 2018, her book, Breathing Race Into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer From Plantation to Genetics, received the Ludwig Fleck Award from the Society for Social Studies of Science.

Braun studied the origins and impact of the asbestos industry on South African workers, often alongside Dr Sophia Kisting, the former executive director of the country’s National Institute for Occupational Health. Braun noticed an enormous disparity between what she read in scientific literature on the topic dating back to the 1920s, and what she saw and heard on the ground while speaking to dozens of people.

Much of the scientific debate around asbestos exposure centred on the length and types of asbestos fibres, and how much airborne dust could be ‘safely’ permitted (there is no safe threshold for working with asbestos, according to the World Health Organisation). Important research, but any mention of who was breathing in those fibres, what happened to their bodies over time, and what types of protection they were – or weren’t – given was largely omitted, Braun argued.

“Scientists who were in a position to do more were unable to incorporate the social context and the biological context” for those exposed to asbestos, said Braun. “I’m not arguing for leaving out the biological, but for making a deep, deep connection between biological and social. I think we failed at that miserably.”

Clouds of dust

Asbestos emerged as an in-demand material, particularly in Western Europe and North America, during the rapid industrialisation of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. South Africa became the world’s major supplier of blue asbestos (crocidolite) and the sole supplier of brown asbestos (amosite). These two types of asbestos are rarer and even more toxic than the more commonly used white asbestos (chrysotile).

At the same time as the nascent asbestos industry emerged, South Africa was enacting the racialised policies which defined much of the century’s politics and economics. “One important part of the social context is that the land was basically being taken away from black farmers and workers, and they were only allowed to do certain kinds of work,” said Braun. The percentage of land the country’s majority-black population could own was limited to just 7% in 1913. This limit was expanded to 13% in 1936.

Needing to find work, the early era of asbestos mining allowed families to stay together and work as a unit. Meanwhile, men were able to do more skilled jobs than those available in gold mining, though conditions and pay were still dire.

The industry evolved and formalised over time as demand grew; peaking in the 1970s, when over 20,000 workers laboured in asbestos mining. Even more people worked informally alongside the asbestos industry, or in other jobs heavily exposed to asbestos, like construction work. The asbestos exported from South Africa to the rest of the world would be used in everything from fake snow and textiles to insulation and brake linings.

Several of the largest South African mines were owned for long periods by British and European companies, including Turner & Newall, Cape, and Eternit. All were aware asbestos dust causes potentially fatal, and incurable, asbestosis by the 1920s, and cancer by the 1940s.

Braun said workers were faced with a choice, “Do they have jobs at all, or do they destroy their health?”

Nevertheless, for decades, people in South Africa were exposed to extraordinary risks. Child labour was rife. One practice, observed in the 1950s, had children stamping on the fluffy asbestos in large shipping bags. Some of these children were noted to have developed asbestosis and cardiac failure from this practice later in life.

Even after research confirmed in 1960 that asbestos dust also causes mesothelioma, a terminal cancer, South African workforces continued labouring in and around asbestos mines for years, unaware of the risks and with few protective measures. Braun heard of workers coming out of the mines “covered in a white dust” of asbestos. To be able to breathe and protect their nose and mouth, they had to use their own handkerchiefs, which were known to be utterly ineffective against asbestos due to the diminutive size of the fibres.

In some areas, women continued cobbing – breaking up the “host” rock, which contains the asbestos, into pieces – generating significant asbestos dust. Younger children were often carried on their mother’s back while they worked. The unique nature of this work, and with people living close to the mines, meant the risk to families from asbestos exposure was extremely high.

In apartheid South Africa, Braun noted, black asbestos miners earned far less pay than whites and weren’t covered by the same health and safety regulations. “Black workers had worse jobs, more dangerous jobs, in whatever industry you are talking about.”

“This racialisation is often very invisible, and then people want to deny it,” said Braun, adding that the same problem exists in the United States.

“There were pretty large campaigns to deny the dangers of asbestos, and the black workers didn’t have a lot of power in that context.” Braun said workers were faced with a choice, “Do they have jobs at all, or do they destroy their health?” Not that the white workers Braun encountered were safe from asbestos diseases, either. Their exposure was less, but still sufficient to cause mesotheliomas due to the potency of asbestos.

Dumping

What happened to workers when they fell ill from asbestos? Braun kept hearing the same story while conducting field research in former mining towns in the early 2000s. In a practice dubbed “dumping,” companies would fire them and leave them to die in the countryside when they got sick.

“They were either dumped in rural areas or it was just routine that they went back to where they came from and died there or had to be cared for in that area,” Braun said. These poorer, rural communities were thoroughly unequipped to help the “horrendous and painful” terminal or disabling diseases caused by asbestos, she observed. This practice continued up until the 1980s.

“I saw what counted as cemeteries for workers who were dumped. There were little humps in the ground, and that was a routine practice that I heard over and over and over,” said Braun. “We tend to not believe workers more often than management, but workers repeatedly were terrified of this because burial practices were really important to black workers and they wanted to be with their families.”

This practice also ensured workers remained unaware of how deadly their work was. Even among those who did return to their hometowns after leaving the mines apparently in good health, they were still at high risk of developing an incurable or fatal asbestos disease later in life.

Some workers attempted to improve conditions, but they faced an uphill struggle. “Any kind of [union] activity was brutally suppressed,” she said. It ultimately took international pressure and a stubborn trade union movement in the 1980s to force modest improvements in working conditions and raise awareness among workers of why they were dying.

Braun argued that these labour policies, working conditions, and the racialised nature of work in South Africa, were largely omitted from the public-health conversation. “This just wasn’t something that science did. It looked purely at this fibre and its interaction in the lungs in particular. Once you look at the labour practices and the general social practices in South Africa, you start to see the story very differently.”

In particular, Braun saw the impact of sidelining the social context in patient care. “The workers didn’t get any of the kind of attention that they needed in order to avoid the extreme disease burden that they bore.” Braun described an “invisible epidemic” of asbestos-related diseases which ravaged South Africans. Tens of thousands of people are estimated to have died.

Who absorbs risk?

An argument Braun often heard is that we need to accept an element of risk in certain types of work that are seen to benefit society at large. She said, “Who determines who will absorb that risk? And who’s not involved in the discussion? Risk is social, it’s not scientific. It’s not this number that a statistician gives to a particular danger, if you will…

“If you can determine socially that certain workers, just for the society to function, need to absorb that risk, you could make a different kind of decision then. Anything that’s social can be undone.”

The last South African mine shut in 2002 after a steady decline from its peak in the 1970s. But the industry’s legacy remains, and the death count continues to mount.

The asbestos mining region, which stretched for hundreds of kilometres across South Africa, is still littered with exposed asbestos. Alongside the old mines, asbestos was widely used as a building material in schools, homes, gardens, and roads. Residents of some of these areas are still waiting for the government to rehabilitate the land and reduce the ongoing risk of this asbestos exposure. In the interim, tens of thousands of South Africans – once again, primarily black and in rural areas, are still being asked to absorb these risks from asbestos today

.

We contacted 44 universities through Freedom of Information requests to better understand the impact asbestos has had on them. The results were revealing. We identified six universities that had received more than five compensation claims relating to asbestos exposure, we found extensive asbestos still on university campuses, and issues with how some universities are managing this asbestos today (part of this was picked up by The National newspaper in Scotland).

Read the full story: https://confrontpower.org/the-enduring-legacy-of-the-asbestos-industry-in-uk-universities/

“We were just playing with death”

The source for much of the most toxic asbestos still in UK buildings is South Africa. We speak to residents of Mafefe, South Africa, who are still dealing with the toxic legacy of the apartheid-era asbestos mines.

The town is still waiting - decades later - for help from the government to help those who continue to fall ill from asbestos diseases, and to clean up the remaining asbestos.

Invisibility, disease, & race: asbestos mining in South Africa

Finally, we spoke with Professor Lundy Braun, who helped explain how asbestos mining continued for as long as it did in South Africa, despite widespread knowledge of the harms of asbestos while it continued to be mined.

Thank you very much for subscribing to Confront. If you appreciate what we do, please tell a friend or share our stories on social media.

After being told of his mesothelioma diagnosis, Terry Higson described it as a death sentence. The cause of his terminal illness was traced back to asbestos exposure in his workplace for much of the 1960s and 1970s – a Chloride battery factory in Greater Manchester.

Chloride Batteries

Chloride produced millions of batteries, which were used in submarines, planes, lighting, trains, and cars. The Clifton Junction factory where Terry worked employed 1,900 people in 1977, before widespread redundancies over the following years.

Terry worked for much of his life for Chloride, starting as a Production Worker in 1963. He stayed with the company until 2005, but left the Clifton factory in 1978 to move to another site.

His wife of over 40 years, Kathleen Higson, told Confront they thought Chloride was a good employer. They had a company doctor and dentist, a good local reputation, and ran events within the community. But they weren’t warned of the dangerous asbestos fibres Terry was inhaling during work.

Terry worked in the Accessory Casting department. There, asbestos-insulating board was continually being cut to line and insulate the moulds inside the batteries. Workers would chisel away at the asbestos sheeting for hours on end.

In addition, each cell within the batteries – which could be quite large – had its own casing box, with a mixture containing blue asbestos as one of the components.

“Now the casings themselves were made in other factories, but they had to be cut to size”, said Industrial Disease lawyer Jordan Bell of Slater & Gordon, who represented Terry. This cutting to size was done with a circular power saw, which operated constantly. It left black dust filling the air, and the workers operating it “black from head to toe, because they’d been covered by the dust.”

There were no dust extraction methods employed. When they cleaned away the large amounts of asbestos dust on the floor, there was no dampening, which would lessen the large volumes of dust that arise from brushing. The risk from asbestos was never told to Terry – not by Chloride, nor by the unions.

Asbestos had been shown to cause mesothelioma, asbestosis, and lung cancer by 1960. The risks of asbestosis from asbestos dust were established in the 1920s.

In 1970 the materials inside the batteries were changed, though the asbestos sheets continued to be used until around 1973. Terry told Bell how seemingly overnight the use of the asbestos sheeting was discontinued, with no explanation.

Archive photos from Salford Community Library of the Chloride Factory at Clifton Junction.

Breathlessness

Until 2018, Terry was in good health, besides a prior health scare and a knee replacement. He had avoided the serious health issues which plagued his father – who smoked, worked with asbestos, and came to depend on an oxygen tank with “terrible lungs” and a debilitating cough later in life.

Terry continued to enjoy exercising and doing DIY jobs around the house. But after painting while on a high ladder, Terry told Kathleen he felt unwell. “I bet you’ve pulled a muscle or something”, she said, telling him to see a doctor. Kathleen described Terry as easy-going and laid back, but she was right to be concerned.

They had a series of meetings with different doctors, and it slowly became clear there was a serious issue. On April 27th 2018, Terry was diagnosed with mesothelioma. He asked the doctor, “How much time do I have?” He was told it could be six months, it could be 30 months. Kathleen had read stories before about mesothelioma; as soon as she heard the word, she knew there was no cure.

“This is because of something that could have been prevented”

After the diagnosis, Terry’s body showed remarkable resilience to the mesothelioma and chemotherapy. He didn’t have a bad cough, though he did struggle with breathlessness. For much of the treatment, Kathleen said “he was more tired than ill”. He couldn’t walk or swim quite as far as normal, or be quite as active with the DIY and gardening. But Terry and Kathleen did go on vacation twice, to Madeira in 2019.

The couple felt immensely well supported by the process after the diagnosis, particularly by the healthcare workers. Their compensation claim was settled out-of-court, without an admission of liability from Chloride, giving Terry some peace that Kathleen would have some security after his passing.

But by early 2021, his condition deteriorated. Terry was taken away to a hospital on January 5th, with Kathleen unsure when he’d return. He never did. The following day she got a call very early in the morning. Terry had died, aged 74. He was survived by Kathleen, along with their daughter Jennifer.

Avoidable

Terry is not the only ex-worker from the Chloride factory in Clifton reported to have died from asbestos diseases. Joan Hill worked alongside her husband Ken at the same factory and died from mesothelioma in 2019. Peter Kirkman, an ex-lab inspector for Chloride’s, including at the Clifton factory, also died from mesothelioma in 2022.

Chloride did not respond when asked to comment on this story.

Kathleen describes Terry as a positive person, who tried to make the best of situations. Even after his diagnosis, he told Kathleen, “Well, we’ll get on with what’s to be.”

Nevertheless, “there was some resentment towards the company where he was exposed to asbestos – they should have been more on the ball,” Kathleen said. “This wasn’t a case of your body failing you… This is being done to you. This is because of something that could have been prevented.”

What do you know about asbestos? That it’s a common building material? That it’s bad for you when airborne? That it’s still in use in dozens of countries?

If you go deeper, you can learn a lot about the injustices of the world through asbestos.

Patterns of industrial denial and corporate negligence. State capture and political inaction. Conspiracies of silence and widespread, often avoidable, human suffering.

These issues are not confined to one company, one country, or one industry. This is why it’s the subject for Series One here at Confront. We will publish original, investigative stories from around the world on the far-reaching and long-lasting consequences of the asbestos industry, and its relevance in the 21st century.

This series is not about the mineral asbestos; it is about who wielded control of it and the subsequent impact this has had on communities worldwide.

Asbestos, a naturally-occurring mineral which comes in six different forms, was widely mined in the 20th century. It’s strong, resistant to heat, fire, chemical and biological degradation, and can be found in thousands of products. Asbestos exposure is also the leading occupational killer in many countries, with an annual death-toll over 200,000 people worldwide according to the World Health Organisation.

The asbestos industry knew by the 1920s that asbestos dust caused asbestosis, a potentially fatal lung disease. The industry learned asbestos can cause lung cancer by the 1940s. By 1960, it knew that asbestos causes another type of cancer, mesothelioma. And yet, even today, workers in some countries continue to be exposed to asbestos without adequate protections or warnings.

An increasing awareness of the potential lethality of asbestos didn’t lead to its immediate decline. Rather, it spiked — 60% of the world’s asbestos in the 20th century was mined between 1970 and 1999, with a peak in 1977, according to the USGS.

“What happens when strong evidence of harm emerges that threatens a global industry?”

The asbestos industry faced a tidal wave of litigation from the 1980s onwards. Billions of dollars have been paid in compensation to victims. But justice – if compensation for severe or terminal illnesses is justice – is wildly unequal. For every cancer patient with a large settlement, there are countless stories of people being neglected, ignored, or forgotten. In many cases, the poverty and pain that can be caused are hidden from view. In this series, we will bring some of these injustices to light.

Mining of blue and brown asbestos, the most carcinogenic, had ceased by 1997. Despite being banned in over 65 countries. white asbestos – the most commonly mined asbestos, continues to be legal where a majority of the world’s population live.

Even in countries where asbestos has been banned for decades, challenges remain. These countries can hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of tonnes of asbestos still residing in their homes, public buildings, or dumps. As time passes these asbestos products will be damaged and degrade, creating new risks and huge expense for its safe removal. Yet some of the worst affected countries, like the United Kingdom and Australia, are criticised by campaigners for not having sufficiently planned how to manage this risk.

The burden of cleaning up this asbestos largely falls on taxpayers, communities, and individuals. Yet despite these enormous costs, which in extreme cases can run into tens of millions of dollars to clean-up a single building, in 2023 a million more tonnes of white asbestos was mined. Future generations will have to pay to clean-up and dispose of this ‘externality’, alongside the illness that comes with all types of asbestos.

We will also hear about many people’s successes in standing up against these injustices and what lessons they can share on how they achieved change.

This series is not about the mineral asbestos; it is about who wielded control of it and the subsequent impact this has had on communities worldwide.

The lessons from asbestos have relevance for some of the most pressing questions of our time. Chief among them is, what happens when strong evidence of harm emerges that threatens a global industry?

Politicians, executives, and civil society are debating the risks and possibilities of complex new technologies like artificial intelligence, advanced robotics and biotechnologies. Meanwhile, our Asbestos series reflects on the extensive foreseeable and unforeseeable consequences a simple mineral like asbestos can have if it is controlled in the interests of the few.

Visit confrontpower.org for more.

What it does lack, still, is investigative journalism.

Investigative journalism which transcends borders and national narratives, and which explores systemic power’s impact on people and planet, is even rarer.

That’s why we started Confront Power.

Confront is a space to encourage deeper thinking about the root causes of the great issues of our time. We want to expand political imaginations beyond individual governments, politicians, or businesspeople, into thinking more structurally, systemically, and conceptually about power throughout the world.

That is the ambition, and it is easier said than done. To do this will take time, and the support of readers. We are a not-for-profit organisation and will depend on readers paying to support our journalism.

All of our content is posted free on confrontpower.org. But by subscribing to our substack you can both help new people find our work and help us grow the organisation going forward.

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