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7:30 Report ABC - Asbestos in Carpet Underlay

Added: 25 August, 2009

James Hardie - Asbestos in Carpet Underlay and Hessian Bags:

Transcript - Sourced from the 7:30 Report on the ABC

KERRY O'BRIEN, PRESENTER: The tragic legacy of James Hardie's asbestos cement products, which has helped push Australia to the top of the world's per capita incidence of the fatal cancer mesothelioma is by now well known.

Experts have warned that the cancer is now being seen in an ever-increasing number of people whose only exposure to asbestos has occurred in the home, renovations and so on. Hardie has admitted its negligence in failing to warn customers of the dangers of asbestos which it covered up for many years.

But there are other deadly secrets the company has never revealed, like the fact that millions of the leaky hessian bags it used to transport its asbestos fibre were recycled for other uses. Many of them ended up as felt under the carpets of Australian homes.

This report from Matt Peacock who has been covering the asbestos story for decades and has just completed a book called "Killer Company" on the Hardie saga.

JOHN DOWNES, FORMER EMPLOYEE, SYDNEY ACTIVE BAG COMPANY: It could be under my son or my daughter's house and then they could end up like me.

ROBERT VOJAKOVIC, PRESIDENT, ASBESTOS DISEASES SOCIETY OF AUSTRALIA: Carpets are very dangerous, because with the passage of time, you know, people would walk on them, dust would actually get closer to the surface of the carpet.

PROFESSOR BILL MUSK, SIR CHARLES GAIRDNER HOSPITAL: Well, they carry with them a hazard of dying from an asbestos-related disease.

MATT PEACOCK, REPORTER: Another lingering legacy from James Hardie's asbestos empire: hessian bags used to transport its asbestos were recycled and used as carpet underfelt.

ROBERT VOJAKOVIC, PRESIDENT: Without any doubt, those bags were extremely dangerous.

MATT PEACOCK: Here at Perth's Asbestos Diseases Society of Australia, President Robert Vojakovic knows only too well how deadly the hessian bags can be. They carried raw blue asbestos from CSR's notorious Wittenoom Mine to the Hardie factories.

ROSE MARIE VOJAKOVIC, COUNSELLOR, ASBESTOS DISEASES SOCIETY OF AUSTRALIA: This is a photograph of the children in the sack race at the Wittenoom festivities. These are the bags that CSR transported the asbestos in. We've been able to establish that four of those children have passed away with mesothelioma.

MATT PEACOCK: Wherever the asbestos bags went according to the society's counsellor Rose Marie Vojakovic, they left a trail of death from the cancerous dust.

ROSE MARIE VOJAKOVIC: When they loaded it into the ships and when it was taken out of the ships it was like a dust storm dropping on them, because they were usually large nets, and the bags being what they were, which was just a hessian, that the asbestos would just fall through.

It was all over the men. You know, we've lost so many wharfies because of this.

MATT PEACOCK: In its 70 years of asbestos production, Hardie also imported millions of bags to feed its voracious factories.

BERNIE BANTON, ASBESTOS CAMPAIGNER: We'd just be covered and refer to ourselves as "snowmen" because of the amount of asbestos in the air just covered you from head to toe.

MATT PEACOCK: Decades later, the dust inhaled in Hardie's factories would kill Bernie Banton and thousands of his fellow workers.

JOHN DOWNES: You can feel your heart pumping trying to get blood to you, to your lungs. And it scares the hell out of you, yes.

MATT PEACOCK: John Downes now has asbestosis, but he never worked for Hardie. He just picked up the empty bags that Hardie sold for recycling to Sydney's Active Bag Company.

Each week John Downes and his brother-in-law would pick up thousands of bags from the Hardie factory in Sydney to be recycled.

JOHN DOWNES: About a million bags a year.

MATT PEACOCK: And that went on for year after year?

JOHN DOWNES: Yeah, as long as I was there, it went on for.

MATT PEACOCK: And presumably it had been happening for decades?

JOHN DOWNES: Before and after, after I left.

MATT PEACOCK: It was the same story across the country. Joe Grurich also picked up Hardie bags for the Fremantle Bag Company, where four of his workmates have now died from mesothelioma. The bags that couldn't be reused went to the carpet factory.

JOSIP GRURICH, FORMER EMPLOYEE, FREMANTLE BAG COMPANY: They were ripped up into the underfelt to make, to put layers under the carpets.

MATT PEACOCK: The recycling companies cleaned the bags to remove any obvious asbestos, but the most dangerous tiny fibres were impossible to get rid of. A fact confirmed by Hardie's own tests on clean bags in 1968, which revealed dust concentrations above the allowable.

JOSIP GRURICH: They weren't clean enough now, because you couldn't ... asbestos is something that sticks and the little needles in the asbestos would be left in the ute, in the machine and that would be left to go under the carpets.

MATT PEACOCK: James Hardie was well aware of the practice, which went on into the 1970s. In 1971, its environmental manager Ray Palfreyman noted a pile of empty bags in its Melbourne factory and was told "these were sold to be pulped for the manufacturer of carpet underlay".

PROFESSOR BILL MUSK: Any process that releases asbestos fibres into the environment that people are going to breathe is potentially dangerous.

MATT PEACOCK: And so carpet underfelt from these bags, potentially dangerous?

PROFESSOR BILL MUSK: So carpet underfelt from these bags is definitely potentially dangerous.

MATT PEACOCK: Professor Bill Musk, a world expert on asbestos disease is increasingly diagnosing mesothelioma in people who've used the recycled bags for other purposes.

PROFESSOR BILL MUSK: If a patient develops mesothelioma, it's very serious stuff. We don't have any cure for mesothelioma. The median or the average person survives for 9 to 12 months once the diagnosis is made and that's a very unpleasant period for them.

MATT PEACOCK: Dora Bush-Jones, her sister and brothers grew up on their parents' West Australian wheat farm, far away from any asbestos mines or factories. In 1987, they were told their mother Beryl Geier was dying from mesothelioma.

DORA BUSH-JONES, DAUGHTER: She just slowly went downhill and within probably about nine months of being told that she had this dreadful disease, the little doctor just told her to go home and get everything in order.

MATT PEACOCK: Then, Dora Bush-Jones and two of her brothers themselves developed lung problems and were referred to Professor Musk.

PROFESSOR BILL MUSK: Well, there had to be asbestos in there somewhere. Mesothelioma is exclusively pretty well caused by asbestos. The background rate in the community is in the order of one or two in a million and usually we can find asbestos exposure if we dig deeper enough.

DORA BUSH-JONES: When my brother, the eldest brother Dougie went, his wife was with him, and she was the one that sort of picked it up. She said to Dougie: "You remember the superbags that had James Hardie asbestos on it?" And he sort of remembered then, 'cause he said he never ever thought of it.

PROFESSOR BILL MUSK: They had not only emptied the superphosphate into the feeder, but they had washed the bags out in the dam so they could be sent back for ... recycled for further superphosphate deliveries.

MATT PEACOCK: The trail of death from the recycled bags stretches from the West Australian wheat farms to Queensland's banana plantations, and the fruit sellers of Victoria markets. But it's home renovators ripping up old carpets that worry Robert Vojakovic the most.

ROBERT VOJAKOVIC: A lot of people renovate, then you rip the carpets out and if you don't dispose of it properly some people wouldn't even know they contained asbestos.

JIM DODDS, WA HEALTH DEPARTMENT: The main thing is to not disturb it and try to get some advice as to whether there is any dust in their house. Our research shows there isn't any dust finding its way into the houses. But most importantly, if they're going to lift the carpet up, they get it done professionally and they have the place professionally cleaned for the dust and that during the process.

PROFESSOR BILL MUSK: They should take precautions to make sure they don't get exposed to asbestos, or dust from the carpet underlay, and especially that their children aren't around when they do it, because the risk is related to how long ago it was and the longer it goes, the greater the risk becomes.

MATT PEACOCK: No one knows how many carpets had the potentially lethal underfelt, but given the millions of bags that were recycled, it could be in thousands, even tens of thousands of homes, and because mesothelioma takes an average of 40 years to develop, the disease may yet strike any of those who've been exposed.

JOSIP GRURICH: You feel that you're short breath or something like that, but you don't, unless somebody tells you, you don't know what's wrong with your lungs.

JOHN DOWNES: You could end up like a lot of other people that have got disease from it. When you see other people - younger people come in and talk to you, and they've only got a few years to live, or less than that. You think, you know, what is government or doctors or anybody doing about it?

See the Video at: http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2009/s2665543.htm