Isn't asbestos used pretty much everywhere in the world (except rich countries)?
So yes, it's dangerous. But it's very cheap, and poverty is far more dangerous than asbestos. It's simply a fact: residents of most countries simply can't afford a 200k dollars asbestos-free house, like Americans or Europeans can.
If Americans had less affordable homes like the rest of the world have, they would still be building them out of asbestos.
Not using asbestos is not the reason why homes in the Western world are expensive.
https://aiobs.org/how-healthy-and-costly-are-the-most-used-i... shows insulation cost for a (typical?) 1500sqft (~140m^2 for the rest of the world) home. The most common, and also the cheapest, type of insulation being fiberglass bats at $560. So if this home would cost $200k, that's 3% of the total price. So even if asbestos would be free, it would barely move the needle in total cost.
Edit: That $560 looks suspiciously low. Googling around some more shows an insulation (incl. installation) cost for a "typical" home at around $3500-$4500. In any case, a small fraction of the total cost of a house project.
A gentle note to anyone reading, fiberglass insulation requires wearing air filters, for the same reasons noted else in this thread. Wear them expecially to cut it, but also just putting it up or working in a crawlspace with it.
That’s not what the manufacturers of modern glass fiber insulation would have you believe. Plenty of people cutting and handling it with no PPE at all in their promotional literature.
Fiberglass is at least pretty easy one to figure out. Don't have to get that stuff in your skin more than once to realize it's probably really, really bad to breathe.
My understanding is that fiberglass and mineral wool [1] are classified as skin (yes, it itches), eye, and lung irritants (coughing), but they're not carcinogenic. Considering how extremely widely they have been used for a long time, if they were we'd most likely have seen it by now.
Sure it's not good for you, so using PPE is certainly warranted, but it's on a whole different level of badness compared to asbestos.
[1] Per wikipedia, there are some varieties of mineral wool used for high temperatures (think insulating industrial furnaces and such) which are carcinogens.
Trump’s EPA had a plan to reconsider a 2024 ban on chrysotile asbestos, but that was pulled back in July and the EPA will indeed preserve and defend the ban.
