At one time, asbestos was used in several types of building
materials, including flooring, siding, and roofing. As time passed,
people started to have adverse reactions to asbestos, including mesothelioma,
lung cancer, and asbestosis. When doing updates to your home, you may
encounter materials such as flooring tiles that are made from asbestos.
Here’s some common ways of identifying asbestos in your
home.
If you suspect that your home may have asbestos
tiles, you can contact a professional to take a small sample and test it for
you. Search your local area for professional asbestos abatement teams
that can help you with that. Once they remove the sample, they’ll do some
testing and let you know whether your tile has asbestos or not. There
may be a fee for this service, and if they find that your tile is made of
asbestos, the best thing to do is to either cover it or hire the asbestos
abatement team to remove it for you. There are special protocols that they
need to follow for removal.
Another way to determine
whether your floor may have asbestos is to try to determine the age of the
flooring. In North America, vinyl flooring installed before 1986 can be
assumed to contain asbestos. Go online and take a look at some photos of
asbestos flooring and see if you can match the pattern with your floor at
home. If the patterns and colors are similar, your flooring could
contain asbestos.
If you can, try to identify the brand,
pattern, or floor style. Sometimes older homes will have extra boxes of
tiles stored in the attic or basement. Those boxes can help you
identify the flooring and determine whether or not it contains
asbestos.
If your floor does contain asbestos, be sure not
to remove it yourself, as you could expose yourself to health hazards.
Keeping the floor intact is the only way to avoid releasing the
asbestos fibers into the air which is how the ailments are caused.
