Taking “Asbestos” off the company name and starting the switch of raw materials (1981)

The time sense of a company that took its signboard down first

The name lost the material in 1981; building materials were free of asbestos in October 1992. Eleven years sit between the two, and the interval shows well what it takes for a materials maker to change its principal raw input. Verifying the performance of a substitute, rewriting the customers’ design and installation standards, and replacing plant equipment all require time that a decision alone cannot reach. The change of name can be read as a move played outward first, before entering that long work.

At the same time, a further gap of five and a half years remains between the renaming in 1981 and March 1987. There was a period in which the company had taken the material off its own signboard while still selling products made from it, and what actually pulled the trigger was not its own judgement but waste from an American aircraft carrier at Yokosuka. The decision to break with a material that supported 90% of sales moved forward not through regulation and not through a name, but through the prospect that the products would stop selling. Some of the specialised sealing materials that kept asbestos to the very end would not disappear for another fourteen years, in 2006.