Hazardous minerals in our immediate environments may seem like relics of the past, safely vanquished for decades.
But Mexican experts say there is still cause for concern about asbestos here. And the issue in Mexico mirrors a severe worldwide problem caused by mines in Canada and elsewhere that have been exporting the fibrous mineral, even though it has been banned or restricted in 52 countries and long excoriated by the World Health Organization (WHO).
“In 2015, we started to see a lot of patients with malignant mesothelioma in the IMSS hospital system in Guadalajara,” said Ruth De Celis Carrillo, a researcher with a PhD in immunology who works in one of the federally funded health facilities.
“Most of the patients we are seeing worked in asbestos manufacturing,” she added, explaining that these Mexican makers of water tanks, roofing, brakes and other products were generally supplied by Canadian mines.
Mesothelioma is a rare, but aggressive and deadly cancer of the lung and nearby organs. It occurs 15 to 40 years after exposure to asbestos and is most frequently seen in people who handled it, such as Canadian miners and Mexican factory workers.
“People ingest asbestos by breathing or eating,” De Celis explained. “When the microscopic fibers get into tissues, they cause severe inflammation.”
I was brought face to face with asbestos when a maintenance specialist, Juan Barajas, cleaned my tinaco (rooftop water storage tank) and informed me that not only was it made of the dread mineral but it was deteriorating, causing the turbidity of my tap water.
Next came a flurry of phone calls and Internet searches and the realization that my apartment building is over 50 years old, putting it squarely in the eras when, first, asbestos tinacos were commonly installed in Mexico and when, second, these tinacos start showing signs of dangerous deterioration. (In another example of delayed results, the curve of a Canadian Environmental Health Atlas graph showing asbestos production levels from Canadian mines almost perfectly mirrors the curve of a graph showing deaths from asbestos 30 years later.)
Barajas explained that newer buildings, such as those in his neighborhood, are equipped with plastic tinacos, generally the Rotoplas brand. And very new buildings don’t have tinacos at all, De Celis told me; they use underground tanks. But I was stuck with an asbestos tinaco, which to the untrained eye look like cement.
One knowledgeable acquaintance, a geologist, told me he doesn’t believe asbestos in the digestive system is as bad as asbestos in the lungs. But a French restaurateur I knew to be conscientious and informed urged me to replace my old tinaco quickly. And so, 15 work hours and 3,500 pesos later, Barajas had unhooked my old asbestos tinaco and installed a beige Rotoplas of the same – 450-liter – capacity.
This might be considered a happy ending, but a little research sometimes gives cause for disquiet.
“Maybe 20 percent of the tinacos in Guadalajara are made of asbestos” – including several that belong to my neighbors,” Barajas informed me.
Ytzel Manjarrez, of the Mexico City hazardous material removal firm Ecosave, said that asbestos can still be found not only in tinacos, but in ceilings, public transportation and plumbing throughout Mexico.
“We’re working so hard to remove it because it’s very dangerous,” she said, noting that asbestos tinacos must be broken into pieces, which is dangerous. “It costs 9,000 pesos to properly remove a small one,” she said. “The people that do it have to wear something like an astronaut’s suit.
“Sometimes poor people buy old tinacos and ceiling materials and resell them to other poor people,” she added.
“There is only one place in Jalisco where you can legally dispose of them,” De Celis said. “A few years ago, I started a campaign to remove asbestos tinacos, but cost was a problem. The removal companies put them in ‘super sacks,’ which are special bags that don’t allow the fibers to escape.” She said the cost would have been nine pesos per kilo, amounting to 630 pesos for a 70-kilo tinaco, much less than the price quoted above.
If the local situation causes concern, other nations, mostly developing ones such as Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, and Thailand, may be in just as bad shape as Mexico. Although Canadian asbestos exports declined after damaging publicity in the 1970s, it continued to send very large shipments to those Asian countries (and Mexico) until at least 2010.
In fact, Canada long resisted the call of WHO and Canadian medical groups to end asbestos production. In 2012, in a move similar to U.S. President Trump’s embrace of the coal industry, the Canadian government even proposed a large loan to help one asbestos mine reopen. Then it suddenly caved in and voted to include chrysotile asbestos on an international group’s blacklist of hazardous materials. This turnaround was accompanied by government aid toward economic development in its asbestos mining regions. In 2012, Canada closed its last asbestos mine and in 2016 it pledged to ban asbestos use, export and import, a feat the United States has not matched, even though asbestos has killed 200,000 U.S. residents and cost the industry $US70 billion in lawsuits. The European Union bans the sale of asbestos.
Unfortunately, progress in Canada has led other asbestos mining countries to take up the slack. The aptly named town of Asbest, with its pit mine half the size of Manhattan, is a star producer in Russia, the current world leader in asbestos mining. Extraction operations there and in other nations, such as China, are underpinned by a rogue’s gallery of shadowy British, American and international high-stakes investors, according to the Center for Public Integrity (CPI), an American watchdog group. Thus, manufacturers of sheet asbestos, brake linings, boilers, roofing, pipes and wire here in Mexico, where regulations are weak and lobbyists enjoy cozy relationships with government officials, currently get their asbestos from mines outside Canada.
What’s more, Mexican manufacturing that uses asbestos is not declining but growing, according to the CPI, which has uncovered health problems in people living near Mexican plants. Australian public health official, Dr. James Leigh, predicts that worldwide deaths related to asbestos could total 10 million by 2030, while Mexican watchdogs say that such deaths could more than double here.
“I’m not happy that old asbestos tinacos are left on roofs,” noted De Celis, the IMSS researcher.
For more information on asbestos, see www.publicintegrity.org.