NARCO Asbestos Trust Claims

If you or someone in your family worked around North American Refractories Company's asbestos products, the refractory gun mixes, castables, and coatings used to line and patch industrial furnaces, and later developed mesothelioma or another asbestos disease, the NARCO trust was built to pay exactly these claims.

North American Refractories Company, known as NARCO, was a major maker of refractory (heat-resistant) products, the materials that line anything built to hold extreme heat: the furnaces, kilns, and vessels of steel mills, foundries, aluminum and glass plants, and power stations. For decades many of its products, sprayed and troweled into place under names like Narcogun and Aerogun, contained asbestos, and the workers who applied, patched, and tore them out breathed the dust. The resulting claims drove the company into bankruptcy, and the reorganization, backed by Honeywell, created a trust to pay the people its products harmed. That trust is unusual in one important way: it pays mesothelioma and other asbestos claims at 100% of their scheduled value, with no reduction, something almost no other asbestos trust can do.

You don't need to have kept your old records, and you don't need to remember which NARCO product you worked around or that NARCO made it. The trust pays on documented exposure to a NARCO asbestos product, and reconstructing that, from work history, military records, and the trust's own documentation, is our job, not yours. If you can tell us where you worked and when, we have a place to start.

What the NARCO trust pays by disease level

What sets this trust apart is at the bottom of the table: it pays 100% of these values, with no payment-percentage reduction. Most asbestos trusts pay only a fraction of a claim's scheduled value, often single digits, because they have to stretch a limited fund across everyone. NARCO's trust pays the full amount.

Mesothelioma sits at the top of the schedule, at Level VII. Its scheduled value (the trust's preset fast-track amount) is $75,000, but its maximum value, reachable through individual review, runs to more than $1.37 million. That gap is the widest of any trust we handle, and it's why the choice of filing track matters more here than almost anywhere: for mesothelioma we always do a thorough exposure-history investigation to determine whether filing Individual Review is warranted, because the difference between the scheduled amount and what your evidence can support is enormous.

A dash in the scheduled column (Lung cancer 2, Level V) means that level has no fixed fast-track amount; it's paid through review against the maximum instead. A dash in the maximum column (the lower two levels) means that level is paid its set scheduled amount with no higher tier above it.

Because the trust pays at 100%, these are the actual dollar figures a claim is paid, not amounts to be discounted later. A scheduled mesothelioma claim is paid $75,000; one taken through individual review can be valued up to more than $1.37 million, and paid in full at that value.

These are one trust's values, not your family's whole recovery, and many people exposed to NARCO products were exposed to other companies' asbestos too, each with its own trust or lawsuit. We come back to that below.

How NARCO's refractory products exposed workers

NARCO made refractories, the heat-resistant materials that line the inside of anything built to contain extreme heat. In a steel mill, a foundry, an aluminum or glass plant, or a power station, the furnaces, ladles, kilns, and vessels all have to be lined with material that can take temperatures that would melt ordinary brick and metal, and that lining is refractory. Many of NARCO's refractory products were made with asbestos.

A lot of NARCO's line came as material that was sprayed or troweled into place rather than laid as brick. Its gun mixes, sold under names like Narcogun and Aerogun, were shot through a machine onto furnace walls and linings; its castables, coatings, and trowel mixes were mixed from dry powder and applied by hand. The exposure was built into the work:

• Mixing the dry material. Cutting open bags of dry refractory mix and gun mix and mixing them, before any water went in, raised clouds of asbestos dust.
• Spraying and applying it. Gunning the mix onto a furnace lining and troweling on castables and coatings put fiber into the air of an enclosed, hot workspace.
• Tearing out the old lining. The heaviest exposure usually came at the other end, when a furnace was taken down for relining and workers broke out the old, baked, friable (crumbly and dusty) refractory, a job repeated every time a furnace cycled through repair.

The workers most exposed were the refractory masons and bricklayers who built and rebuilt the linings, and the steel, foundry, aluminum, and glass workers, and power-plant workers, who worked around the furnaces while it was done. It was hot, dusty, repetitive work, done in confined spaces over a full career. See how asbestos refractory products caused exposure. That industrial setting is the first sign of why a NARCO claim is rarely the only one.

How the NARCO bankruptcy created the asbestos trust, and the Honeywell buyout

In January 2002, North American Refractories Company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, the kind that lets a business reorganize instead of shutting down, under the weight of the asbestos claims against its refractory products. NARCO wasn't the only company those claims named: Honeywell International had also been named as a defendant, through a long-standing corporate relationship that left it responsible for NARCO's asbestos liability. 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 bankruptcy law written specifically for asbestos cases, Section 524(g). It lets a court set up a trust to take over the asbestos liability, then issue a channeling injunction, a court order that routes every asbestos claim, the ones already filed and the ones that haven't happened yet, away from the companies and into the trust. From that point on, the trust pays the claims in their place, and NARCO and Honeywell are both protected from being sued over that asbestos again.

The plan took years to finalize, becoming effective in 2013, and the trust was funded by Honeywell, through an initial cash contribution, stock in the related refractory business, and an obligation to keep making payments over time. Then, in a step that made this trust unusually secure, Honeywell bought its way out of those ongoing obligations: in January 2023 it paid the trust a single lump sum of about $1.33 billion to settle all of its future funding duties at once. The result is a trust that is now a fixed, fully funded, self-contained pool of money, no longer depending on any company's future payments, which is a large part of why it can pay claims at 100%.

The companies behind it are alive and well. Honeywell, which funded the trust, is one of the largest industrial companies in the world. NARCO's own refractory business continued and is today part of Harbison-Walker International, a major refractory maker. (The historical Harbison-Walker asbestos claims are handled by a separate trust, covered on our Harbison-Walker asbestos trust page.) For a claimant, the practical point is that this is a secure, fully funded trust created for exactly this purpose, and filing a claim doesn't take a dollar from anyone working today.

Why the NARCO trust pays the full value, not a percentage

Almost every asbestos trust pays only a fraction of what a claim is worth. NARCO's is different: it pays 100%. There's no payment-percentage reduction, so the scheduled or individually reviewed value of a claim is what the claim is actually paid.

That difference is worth understanding, because it's rare. Most trusts pay a percentage, often a small one, for a simple reason: the company that funded the trust couldn't cover everything it owed, so the trust has to share a limited fund across everyone it will ever pay, the people already sick and the people who won't be diagnosed for decades. Paying a fraction of each claim is how those trusts make the money last. NARCO's trust doesn't face that constraint in the same way. It was funded, and then fully bought out by Honeywell, with enough to cover its expected claims in full, so it pays them in full.

How you file still decides which value applies, and here that choice carries real weight:

• Expedited Review is the fast track: if your diagnosis and exposure fit the trust's criteria, the claim is paid the fixed scheduled value for your disease level, quickly and with less paperwork. For mesothelioma that scheduled amount is $75,000, paid in full.
• Individual Review is the evidence-based track: the trust weighs the specifics of your case and can value the claim up to the much higher maximum, more than $1.37 million for mesothelioma, also paid in full.

That is an unusually large gap, and it's the one place a reader should be careful: 100% of the scheduled value is still only the scheduled value, and for a serious diagnosis like mesothelioma the individual-review value is usually far greater. We always look closely at whether individual review is warranted, because here it can mean the difference between $75,000 and many times that. The trust periodically adjusts its higher values for inflation, and we work from whatever figures are in force when your claim is filed.

Is the NARCO trust still able to pay?

Yes, and few asbestos trusts are on more solid footing. Here's the picture from its most recent annual report.

• About $1.26 billion on hand. At the end of 2025 the trust held roughly $1.26 billion in net assets available to pay claims (what the trust calls net claimants' equity), a very large fund relative to the claims it pays.
• About $76 million paid to claimants in 2025. In that single year the trust paid out roughly $76 million, and more than $775 million over its life so far.
• A fixed, fully funded pool, paying at 100%. Since Honeywell's 2023 buyout, the trust no longer depends on any company's future payments; it's a self-contained fund, and the clearest sign of its strength is that it pays claims at 100% of their value, which almost no other asbestos trust can do.

None of that makes the money infinite, and the trust still values claims carefully and holds reserves against the claims still to come. But it's open, exceptionally well funded, and paying in full right now, and a claim filed today is paid on the current schedule. We track the annual reporting and can walk through the full financial picture with you when you call.

Who qualifies for a NARCO trust claim

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

You have to show exposure to an actual NARCO product. The trust pays on real exposure, proof that a NARCO asbestos-containing product was present where you worked and that you were occupationally exposed to it, not on the mere fact that NARCO was once named in asbestos litigation. That's a meaningful distinction, and meeting it is a matter of reconstructing where you worked and what was used there, which is our job.

For mesothelioma, you don't need heavy exposure. Mesothelioma can come from brief, limited exposure, and the trust recognizes that, so a meso claim doesn't have to meet the higher dose threshold that applies to some other diseases. That threshold, Significant Occupational Exposure (SOE), is defined here as about five years of qualifying asbestos work before December 1986. It applies to the lung-cancer and other-cancer levels and the severe asbestosis level, not to mesothelioma. The trust treats certain furnace work as presumptively meeting it: furnace construction and repair in the iron, steel, aluminum, and glass industries and in electric power generation, which is exactly the work NARCO's products were used for.

Family members can qualify too. If a worker brought NARCO 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 take-home asbestos exposure works.

How the trust's worksite list and product identification work

The trust recognizes exposure two ways, and you only need one of them. The first is its worksite list: more than 850 sites the trust already accepts as places NARCO asbestos products were present, during identified periods. If you worked at a listed site in the covered period, that part is straightforward. The second is product identification: credible evidence that you worked around a NARCO product on a regular basis, even at a site the list never names, established through a coworker's account, a purchase or specification record, or the kind of work you did and where.

But proving a NARCO product was at your worksite, by either door, isn't the same as being exposed to it, and a solid claim shows both. NARCO's refractory gun mixes, castables, and coatings released fiber when they were mixed from dry powder, sprayed and troweled on, and above all torn out during a reline, so we use the exposure record on those refractory products, together with your work history, to connect your tasks to exposure. Whether you did that work yourself or worked alongside the masons who did, the list puts the product at your site; the task evidence is what ties it to you.

Not finding your site on the list is a reason to look closer, not to give up. You can also search our directory of asbestos exposure sites to see whether the place you worked is already documented.

How a NARCO 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 NARCO product. Putting that together is our job, not yours. We gather the medical records, reconstruct the work history, match it against the trust's worksite list or document the NARCO products you worked around, and weigh the most important choice on this trust, whether to take the scheduled fast-track payment or pursue the much higher individual-review value. You don't need to have kept paperwork or remember product names to start.

The NARCO 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.

A NARCO claim is rarely the only one

Here's the part that changes the math for most families, and refractory work is a special case of it: the NARCO trust is usually one claim out of several.

The refractory industry produced more than one bankrupt company, and a worker who was around NARCO's products was very often around other refractory makers' products too, on the same furnaces, in the same mills. Two of those companies have their own trusts: the Harbison-Walker asbestos trust and the A.P. Green asbestos trust, both covering refractory brick and related products. A furnace or steel-mill career often supports claims against more than one of these at once.

And that's before the rest of the plant. Around the furnaces were insulated pipes and boilers, gaskets and packing on the equipment, and the other asbestos materials of heavy industry, made by many manufacturers, a number of whom left their own trusts. So the same work history that supports your NARCO claim usually supports a stack of others, and because each trust reviews and pays independently, the claims don't compete. They add up. how asbestos trust claims work.

This is why the thorough exposure investigation is worth so much. Each trust pays its own value, and a work history that turns up several refractory trusts plus the surrounding ones can change the total on a mesothelioma claim by a wide margin. We walk through a full worked example in our guide to mesothelioma trust settlement values.

Even stacked across many trusts, trust claims are still only one part of a recovery, and some of the other parts can be larger. The full set of channels is laid out in the recovery options on this page.

Sources of compensation beyond the NARCO trust

A NARCO 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. The NARCO trust is one, and a refractory or heavy-industry career almost always reaches several others, the other refractory makers and the makers of the insulation, gaskets, and equipment around the furnaces. They review and pay independently, so they stack. how asbestos trust claims work.
• Lawsuits against solvent manufacturers. Not every asbestos maker went bankrupt. Some are still in business and 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. how asbestos product liability lawsuits work.
• Premises liability against the site owners. The steel mills, foundries, aluminum and glass plants, and power stations where these refractories were used can be held responsible for the conditions there, separate from the companies that made the products. how premises liability claims work.
• 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. A veteran's service can support VA disability benefits; work at a federal facility can support FECA benefits (the Federal Employees' Compensation Act); and Social Security disability is available to anyone whose illness stops them from working. how asbestos disability and benefit claims work.

Your NARCO 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. The liability was settled 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 manufacturers still in business and the site owners where you worked. 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.