A.P. Green Asbestos Trust Claims

If you or someone in your family worked around A.P. Green's refractory products, the firebrick, cement, and insulation built to line furnaces and boilers, and later developed mesothelioma or another asbestos disease, the company left behind a trust built to pay exactly these claims.

For most of the twentieth century, A.P. Green was one of the country's major makers of refractories, the heat-resistant firebrick, cement, mortar, and insulation that line anything built to run hot: furnaces, kilns, boilers, and the ladles that carry molten metal. For decades, many of those products were made with asbestos, and the work of installing and tearing them out put the dust into the air. When the asbestos claims came, A.P. Green and its affiliated companies went through bankruptcy, and the trust that resolved the claims was funded with about $376 million, drawn from the company's insurance and a stake in the refractory business that carried on after it. That trust has been paying mesothelioma and other asbestos claims since 2014, and it's still open today.

You don't need to have kept your old records, and you don't need to remember which company made the brick or cement you worked around. The trust pays on documented exposure to A.P. Green asbestos products, and reconstructing your history, identifying where those products were used at the plants and job sites where you worked, is our job, not yours. If you can tell us where you worked and when, we have a place to start.

What the A.P. Green trust pays, by disease

Claim values before the payment percentage is applied.

Unlike many trusts, the A.P. Green trust pays a single set value for each disease rather than a scheduled-average-maximum range. Your actual payment is that value times the trust's current payment percentage, 6.0%, so a mesothelioma claim of $165,694 pays about $9,900. Lung cancer 2 (Level V) is the exception: it has no set value and is decided through Individual Review, capped at $15,000. The trust raised its percentage in 2026, and when a trust raises its percentage, claimants paid earlier at the lower rate can receive a supplemental payment for the difference.

Read these as one trust's share, not your whole recovery. The dollars above are what the A.P. Green trust pays on its own, and for most people it's one name on a long list. A working life around furnaces and boilers usually meant exposure to many manufacturers' refractories and insulation, each with its own trust or lawsuit, and the claims run in parallel without canceling each other out. So the number that matters for your family isn't any single trust's payment, it's the total across all of them, and that's the case we build. Learn more about how asbestos trust claims work.

How A.P. Green refractory products exposed workers to asbestos

A.P. Green made refractories: the firebrick, cement, and mortar that line the furnaces, kilns, boilers, and ladles built to run at extreme heat. For most of the twentieth century, the materials that held up to that heat were strengthened and bound with asbestos, and many of A.P. Green's products, especially the cements, mortars, adhesives, and insulating materials, contained it.

The exposure came from the ordinary work of building and rebuilding hot equipment, not from anything unusual:

• Mixing and applying refractory cement and mortar. These came as a dry powder, asbestos among the ingredients, mixed with water on site and troweled or packed into place, dusty in the bag and dusty in the mixing. See how asbestos refractory products caused exposure.
• Cutting and fitting brick and block. Sizing firebrick and insulating block to a furnace or boiler meant sawing and shaping it, which released fiber every time. See how asbestos insulating products caused exposure.
• Tearing out spent linings. The dustiest work of all came on rebuilds, when crews demolished the old lining, baked hard and friable (crumbly and dusty) by years of heat, to reline the furnace. Ripping out degraded material released far more fiber than installing it new.

None of this stayed with one trade. Furnace and boiler rebuilds happened in crowded industrial settings, so the dust reached everyone working the job. The bricklayers and refractory masons who built and tore out the linings breathed the most of it, alongside the boilermakers, steelworkers, and foundry and furnace crews who shared the same hot, dusty spaces, in steel mills, foundries, glass plants, and power plants.

That's also why an A.P. Green claim is rarely a claim against A.P. Green alone. A working life around furnaces meant handling refractories, cements, and insulation from many different manufacturers, and A.P. Green was usually one maker among them, which is where a single claim tends to open into several.

How the A.P. Green bankruptcy created the asbestos trust

By the early 2000s, A.P. Green and its affiliated companies were facing more asbestos claims than they could pay. In 2002, the group filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, the kind that lets a business reorganize instead of simply closing down. Filing didn't erase the claims. It moved them into a process built to handle them all at once.

That process runs on a part of the federal Bankruptcy Code written specifically for asbestos cases, Section 524(g). It lets a court set up a trust to take over a company's asbestos liability and issue a channeling injunction, a court order that routes every asbestos claim, the ones already filed and the ones still years from surfacing, into the trust instead of the company. From that point on, the trust pays the claims in the company's place.

There's a piece of A.P. Green's history that many people don't know: its claims were being paid even before its own trust existed. Because U.S. Gypsum had bought A.P. Green back in 1967, U.S. Gypsum's own asbestos trust handled A.P. Green claims for a time. A.P. Green's separate trust was established in 2013 and opened to claims in 2014, taking over that responsibility under its own rules. It was funded with about $376 million, drawn from the company's insurance recoveries, a schedule of future insurance payments, and a stake in the successor refractory company. That trust is what you file against today; the company itself can no longer be sued for the asbestos in its old products.

The company is gone, but the work it did continues. A.P. Green isn't in business anymore. Its refractory operations were folded into a larger refractories group years before the bankruptcy, and there's no operating company trading under the A.P. Green name today. The refractory work it had built carried on under a successor company, a separate business, and that's part of how the trust came to be funded the way it was: alongside the insurance recoveries, the trust received a stake in that successor refractory company. Two things follow for your claim. The records and history behind your exposure still exist, so it can be reconstructed. And because the trust, funded by insurance and that stock, is what pays these claims, filing yours takes nothing from any working business or the people it employs.

What the A.P. Green trust pays, and why it's a percentage

The trust pays a set amount based on your diagnosis, scaled to how serious the disease is, with mesothelioma at the top of the schedule and the non-malignant conditions like asbestosis lower down. The full breakdown by disease is in the table near the top of this page.

Most claims are paid that set scheduled value for the disease level, the standard path, with no negotiation and a quicker turnaround. A separate, more evidence-intensive path, Individual Review, comes into play in two situations: for Lung Cancer 2 (Level V), which has no set value and is decided case by case, and for what the trust calls an Extraordinary Claim. An Extraordinary Claim is the rare case where someone's asbestos exposure came overwhelmingly from A.P. Green itself, often its own plant workers, with little chance of recovery anywhere else; such a claim can be awarded up to five times the scheduled value. It's an uncommon situation, and the exposure investigation is how we tell whether it fits.

Whichever path applies, the trust doesn't pay the full value of the claim. It pays a percentage of it, currently 6.0%, a few cents on each dollar of a claim's value.

That number surprises people, so here's why it's there. It's the same principle behind every bankruptcy: when a company can't cover everything it owes, the law shares what there is across everyone it harmed, so that everyone gets a fair portion instead of a lucky few collecting in full and everyone else collecting nothing. An asbestos trust has to do that across time as well, because these diseases can take thirty to fifty years to surface, so the trust has to hold back enough for the family that won't be diagnosed until 2045.

The percentage isn't fixed, and it doesn't only fall. The trust reviews it as its finances and claim projections change, and it can move up as well as down: A.P. Green's trust raised its percentage in 2026. When a trust raises its rate, it goes back and pays a supplement to claimants who were paid earlier at the lower rate, so an increase reaches people who already filed, not just new ones. We work from whatever the trust is paying when your claim is filed, and we confirm it against the trust's current notice.

Is the A.P. Green trust still able to pay?

Yes, and of the asbestos trusts this is one of the healthier pictures. A trust that pays a small percentage can leave people wondering whether there's much left, so here's where it stands from its most recent annual report.

• About $186 million on hand. At the end of 2025 the trust held roughly $186 million in net assets, what its accounts call net claimants' equity, and that figure grew over the year, because its investment returns ran ahead of what it paid out.
• Hundreds of millions paid since it opened. The trust was formed with about $376 million in 2013 and has paid out a large share of that to claimants in the years since, while continuing to take in scheduled insurance payments and investment income.
• Its payment percentage went up, not down. In 2026 the trust raised its rate rather than cutting it, and paid supplements to people who had filed earlier at the lower rate. A trust raising its percentage is a sign of financial strength, the opposite of one struggling to stretch its funds.

None of that means the money is unlimited, and it's why the trust still pays a set percentage rather than the full value of each claim: it's holding reserves against a long line of claims still to come. But the trust is open, funded, and paying right now, and a claim filed today is paid on the current schedule.

Who qualifies for an A.P. Green trust claim

A trust claim rests on two things: a qualifying asbestos diagnosis, and proof that you were exposed to A.P. Green asbestos products during the period the trust covers. The diagnosis side is medical. The exposure side is where the trust's specific rules come in, and where most of our work happens.

The exposure has to fall before the end of 1982. Like most asbestos trusts, the A.P. Green trust pays on exposure from before December 31, 1982. The reasoning traces back to when the danger became widely known and warnings went up, and we lay out that full logic, along with your options if your exposure came later, in our guide to how asbestos trust claims work. For A.P. Green, the asbestos products were made and used well before that date, so the cutoff is rarely the obstacle people fear.

For mesothelioma, you don't need heavy exposure. Mesothelioma can come from brief, limited exposure, and the trust recognizes that: a meso claim needs a diagnosis and exposure to A.P. Green asbestos, without the higher dose threshold that applies to some other diseases. That threshold, Significant Occupational Exposure (SOE), is about five years of total asbestos exposure with at least two of those years before the end of 1982. It applies to the lung cancers, other cancers, and the asbestosis levels, most of which also ask for at least six months of A.P. Green exposure before the cutoff and supporting medical findings like a breathing test (a pulmonary function test). SOE can add up across different jobs and employers, and it can come from working near the dust, not only from handling the material yourself. Learn more about how asbestos trust claims work.

You don't need to have known the brand, or worked for A.P. Green. The trust pays on exposure to A.P. Green products, and almost no one kept track of which company made the firebrick, cement, or insulation they worked around decades ago. You don't need to. Reconstructing which manufacturers' products were present at the furnaces, boilers, and plants where you worked, and tying A.P. Green to them, is the heart of the exposure investigation, and it's our job, not yours.

Family members can qualify too. If an A.P. Green worker, or a tradesman exposed to its products, brought the dust home, a spouse who laundered the work clothes or a child in the household can file on the worker's exposure history, the same history that supports the worker's own claim.

How the A.P. Green Approved Site List Works

When A.P. Green went through bankruptcy, the trust identifies where its asbestos products were present using a list of the employers and worksites its products were sold and supplied to, more than 13,000 of them, in all fifty states and the District of Columbia. Finding your worksite on it matters, because it establishes that A.P. Green material was there while you were. But that's the starting point of a claim, not the whole of it.

Being at a listed site isn't the same as being exposed to A.P. Green's product there. The trust asks both questions: whether A.P. Green asbestos was present, and whether the work you did would have put it in your air. So we look at what you actually did, and at the work going on around you. A.P. Green made refractory brick and high-temperature cements, the linings that stood up to heat inside furnaces, boilers, kilns, and other hot equipment. Those products released fiber when the dry cement was mixed, when brick was cut and fitted, and most of all when an old, heat-degraded lining was torn out and rebuilt, turning friable (crumbly and dusty) material into airborne dust. Whether you did that work yourself or worked alongside the tradesmen who did, we use the exposure record on asbestos refractory brick and cement, together with your work history, to connect your tasks to exposure from A.P. Green's material. Presence puts the product at your site; the task evidence is what ties it to you.

The list isn't the whole story either, and this is where people wrongly count themselves out. A list built decades after the fact doesn't capture every place the product ended up, and a site may be missing or recorded under an employer name that has since changed. Not being on the list doesn't disqualify you; it means we document the exposure another way, through work history, purchasing records, and coworkers' accounts. We check the list first, but we don't stop there. You can also search our directory of asbestos exposure sites to see whether the place you worked is already documented.

How an A.P. Green claim gets filed

A trust claim isn't a lawsuit, and that surprises people who expect a courtroom. There's no judge, no jury, no deposition, and no defense lawyer arguing the other side. You're not suing anyone. You're submitting a documented claim to a fund that already exists to pay it, and the trust reviews it against its written rules and pays on its schedule.

What the claim needs is proof of two things: your diagnosis, and your exposure to A.P. Green asbestos products during the covered period. Putting that together is our job, not yours. We gather the medical records, reconstruct the work history, identify where A.P. Green products were used at the places you worked, and prepare the claim on the form the trust requires. You don't need to have kept paperwork or remember product names to start.

The A.P. Green trust has been open and paying since 2014 and is still accepting claims today, so the door isn't closed. The fuller mechanics of how trust claims are prepared, filed, and paid are laid out in our guide to how asbestos trust claims work. When you call, we'll tell you what your specific claim is likely to involve and how the timeline tends to run.

An A.P. Green claim is rarely the only one

Here's the part that changes the math for most families: the A.P. Green trust is usually one claim out of several, and the others come from the same work.

A working life around furnaces, boilers, and kilns meant handling refractories, cements, and insulation made by many different companies, not just A.P. Green. Several of those manufacturers went bankrupt too, and each one left its own trust. So the same exposure history that supports your A.P. Green claim usually supports a stack of others, and because each trust reviews and pays independently, the claims don't compete with each other. They add up.

This is why the thorough exposure investigation is worth so much. Each trust pays its own fraction, and most pay modestly on their own, but a work history that turns up many trusts instead of a few can change the total on a mesothelioma claim by a wide margin. We walk through a full worked example, several trusts totaled across one career, in our guide to mesothelioma trust settlement values.

There's an exception that runs the opposite way. A smaller group of people, mainly those who worked in A.P. Green's own plants, were exposed to asbestos overwhelmingly from A.P. Green and may have few other claims to bring. For them the value isn't in the stack, it's in the A.P. Green claim itself, which through the Extraordinary Claim process can be worth several times the standard value. The same exposure investigation sorts out which situation is yours: it either builds the stack of claims against the other makers whose products you handled, or it establishes that A.P. Green was the overwhelming source and makes the case for that larger single award. Either way the goal is the same, the most your history can support.

Even at its fullest, trust recovery is still only one part of an A.P. Green case, and some of the other parts can be larger. The full set of channels, including the lawsuits and benefits that run alongside the trusts, is laid out in the recovery options on this page.

Sources of compensation beyond the A.P. Green trust

An A.P. Green claim usually sits inside a larger recovery, and the channels run in parallel without canceling one another out. We file across all of them that apply.

• Asbestos bankruptcy trusts. A.P. Green is one, and a working life around furnaces and boilers almost always reaches several others, the makers of the other refractories and insulation handled on the same jobs. They review and pay independently, so they stack. Learn more about how asbestos trust claims work.
• Lawsuits against solvent manufacturers. Not every asbestos maker went bankrupt. The makers of refractory and insulation products still in business can be sued directly for selling a product they knew was dangerous, and a lawsuit can recover more than a trust claim, though it takes longer. Learn more about asbestos product liability lawsuits.
• Premises liability against the site owners. The steel mills, foundries, power plants, and other plants where the furnaces and boilers were lined and rebuilt can be held responsible for the conditions they allowed, separate from the companies that made the products. Learn more about premises liability lawsuits.
• Federal and disability benefits. These depend on where and how the work was done, and they're paid on top of the trust and lawsuit recovery. Because A.P. Green refractories lined boilers and furnaces on Navy ships and at military and federal sites, military service can support VA disability benefits, civilian shipyard work can support Longshore benefits (LHWCA, the federal program for maritime and harbor workers), and civilian work at a federal facility can support FECA benefits (the Federal Employees' Compensation Act); Social Security disability is available to anyone whose illness stops them from working. Learn about asbestos disability and benefit claims.

Your A.P. Green trust claim has no defenses to answer. It's a paper claim: no opposing lawyer, no deposition, no courtroom, no one arguing the other side. A.P. Green settled that question when the trust was funded, and the trust either pays the claim or it doesn't, on its written rules.

Defenses only come up on the lawsuit side, the claims that run alongside the trust against the companies still in business that made the products used at your sites and the owners of the sites themselves. Those defendants raise the same handful of arguments they raise in most asbestos cases, and none of them is new to us. The short version is that each one describes a cleaner, smaller version of the work than the one your loved one actually did, and the evidence answers it.