" The Trump administration has done the opposite of what advocates expected. On the last day of the Obama Administration, in a now-vanished press release, the EPA announced ten toxic chemicals that would be the first to be reevaluated under the revised TSCA. Asbestos was one of them. In May, Trump’s EPA announced it would not investigate indirect exposure to those chemicals, including in air or water. Asbestos that winds up in landfills would no longer be included in the agency’s risk assessments, nor would so-called “legacy uses”—meaning older buildings with degrading, asbestos materials no longer intended for manufacture. Those considerations would guide the way the EPA reviews new asbestos uses that come before it."

"All that said, it’s extremely unlikely that companies will be chomping at the bit to put asbestos back into your house. They have been free to use the stuff for decades. But the last US asbestos producer shut down in 2002. In 2016, only two companies, Axiall Corporation and Olin Corporation, imported asbestos in significant quantities—both to synthesize industrial chlorine for use in PVC piping and other plastics. (This process was exempted from both the failed EPA ban and the European Union’s comprehensive ban in 2005, on the grounds that asbestos use was confined to the production process.) According to the USGS, the chloralkali industry likely accounted for 100 percent of domestic asbestos consumption in 2016. While some finished products containing asbestos—including brake liners, roof coatings, and gaskets—are imported into the country, their total value is estimated at under $5 million."

"What explains the cratering in asbestos use, even as the EPA had its hands tied by the 1991 court ruling? Health and liability issues. Because asbestos is so indisputably linked to cancer, asbestos lawsuits are a multi-billion-dollar industry. Approximately 100 companies have been forced into bankruptcy by asbestos litigation, to the extent that Congress had to amend the Bankruptcy Code to allow special asbestos trusts. Plenty of non-carcinogenic substitutes are readily available, and even the chloralkali industry is slowly changing its ways."