The government has finally commissioned a study of the risks and consequences of asbestos exposure in France. While the full report will only be published in 2007, the initial findings, made public this month, make depressing reading. The report accuses primarily the government for not taking the problem seriously enough. France, declares the report, is 30-40 years behind its industrial partners in tackling its asbestos heritage.
International comparisons are especially revealing: the first health warnings issued to protect workers was made law in 1931 in the UK and in 1946 in the USA. Similar regulations in France came into effect in 1977. Asbestos-related deaths are now declining in the US whereas in France they are growing every year. Asbestos was outlawed in France as late as 1996. Given that the cancers associated with asbestos can take 30 years to develop, epidemiologists believe France will have its peak of asbestos-related deaths only by 2020-30.
The public image of the asbestos problem is the Tour Montparnasse. Europe’s second highest skyscraper with 59 floors, it was built in the early 1970s and houses 5,000 office workers. Earlier this year, a report was leaked that confirmed that the tower was riddled with asbestos. The clean-up cost is initially estimated to be €4M per floor.
But the tour Montparnasse is just the tip of the asbestos iceberg. At the height of its popularity, in the building boom of the 1960-70s, France imported the equivalent of 80kgs of asbestos per inhabitant. When its use was outlawed in 1996, the government put a rough figure of the amount of asbestos that had to be extracted from buildings at 100M m².
One key problem is simply identifying the asbestos sites: there is no database or record of buildings that contain asbestos. Hence, the problem tends to emerge when buildings change ownership – when an asbestos survey is required. Another problem is that the laws on cleaning up asbestos are not especially clear or rigorous. An owner has three years to clean up a site if asbestos is found but there is no government inspection of this clean-up.
The scandal surrounding the tour Montparnasse and the revelations of the health reports coming out now are likely to act as a catalyst for action. New, stricter legislation is likely. But France will face another problem: the skills needed to de-contaminate sites are not widespread in France and already there are complaints of a shortage of skilled workers and contractors
The scandal surrounding the tour Montparnasse and the revelations of the health reports coming out now are likely to act as a catalyst for action. New, stricter legislation is likely. But France will face another problem: the skills needed to de-contaminate sites are not widespread in France and already there are complaints of a shortage of skilled workers and contractors
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