Asbestos Paper Products: Felts, Gasket Paper, and Millboard

Asbestos paper was everywhere ordinary paper couldn't survive: under vinyl floors, on rooftops, wrapped around pipelines, lining furnaces and appliances, and cut into gaskets on the shop bench. It looked like the most harmless material in the building, and it was among the purest asbestos products ever sold, with some papers running as high as 97% fiber. Cutting asbestos tape and specialty paper has been measured at 49 fibers per cubic centimeter, which in fifteen minutes puts roughly fourteen years' worth of ordinary city background air through a worker's lungs¹, and the government's own contractor documented that kind of fiber release across the industry. You don't need to remember which brand you handled or dig up any old records to find out whether you have a claim; if you worked around this material, that's where we start.

Even ordinary city air carries a faint trace of asbestos everywhere, from natural mineral erosion and decades of industrial use, and that trace is the baseline both sides of the panel are measured against.

What these numbers mean. Asbestos in air is measured in fibers per cubic centimeter (f/cc), a unit that hides how dangerous a task was. Across this site we translate each measurement into fibers breathed, feet of fiber end to end, and years of ordinary city air, using conservative, government-sourced assumptions. See how we measure asbestos in air for the method and its limits.

What asbestos paper products were

Asbestos paper is exactly what it sounds like: paper made from asbestos fiber instead of wood pulp, run through the same kind of papermaking machinery. Wood-pulp paper burns, rots, and soaks through; asbestos paper does none of those things, so it became the industry's answer wherever a thin, cheap, formable sheet had to stand up to heat, moisture, or electricity. Between the early 1900s and the 1980s it was one of the most widely distributed asbestos product families in the country, and one of the least recognized, because nothing about a roll of felt or a sheet of gray board looks dangerous.

The family came in a few standard forms. Flooring felt was a saturated asbestos paper laid as the backing and underlayment beneath sheet vinyl and linoleum floors. Roofing felt was the heavier, asphalt-saturated version rolled out across rooftops and mopped into built-up roofs. Gasket paper was sheet stock sold in rolls so that mechanics and pipefitters could cut their own flat gaskets on the bench. Millboard was the thick, rigid board of the family, up to a quarter inch or more, used for heat shields, furnace and stove linings, safe and door cores, and protective panels around anything hot. And a long tail of specialty papers did everything else: electrical insulating paper wound into motors and appliances, pipeline wrap, asbestos tape, and acoustical and insulating felts inside walls and equipment.

Much of it was sold under names a supply house would recognize, and the fiber content ran remarkably high.

Representative products and their asbestos content. These are examples, not a full list:

A product that's 95 or 97% asbestos is, for practical purposes, a sheet of nearly pure fiber held together with a little binder. The fiber in all of these was chrysotile (white asbestos, the most common commercial type), and chrysotile is classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer as carcinogenic to humans and is a recognized cause of mesothelioma³. When a defense lawyer says "it was only chrysotile," the answer is that chrysotile is exactly what causes the disease in these cases, delivered here in some of the purest concentrations the industry ever sold.

How paper products put asbestos in the air

A roll of felt sitting on a shelf doesn't shed much fiber. The exposure came from working the material, and asbestos paper, unlike a boiler's insulation or a ship's bulkhead, was made to be worked. Flooring felt was cut to fit the room and torn out again decades later when the floor was replaced. Roofing felt was cut, ripped, and stripped off in tear-offs. Gasket paper existed so someone could cut gaskets out of it, one at a time, at a bench. Millboard was sawed, scored, snapped, and drilled to shape. Every one of those operations breaks the sheet open and drives dry, friable (crumbly and dusty) fiber into the breathing zone, and almost all of it was done by hand, with no ventilation, inches from the worker's face.

Here is what that fabrication work measured. Each figure is a phase-contrast (PCM) measurement, which counts only the longer fibers and so it represents the minimum level of exposure, not the maximum.

By the illustrative math on our how we measure asbestos in air page, 15 minutes of cutting asbestos tape put roughly 14 years of ordinary city air through the lungs. This estimates fibers in the air breathed, not a retained dose.

What the makers knew

Two threads of the record matter for paper products, and both are on paper themselves.

The first is that the fiber release from this work wasn't hidden or hard to find; the federal government's own contractor documented it. The GCA/Technology Division studies of the American asbestos-paper-products industry, performed under EPA contract, measured secondary-fabrication fiber release across exactly the tasks described above: millboard cutting, felt and wrap handling, and specialty-paper work¹. They were measurements of the ordinary, everyday operations the products were sold to be used for, and they recorded fiber levels that turn a quarter hour of bench work into years of background exposure.

The second thread is what the manufacturers knew, and when. Johns-Manville and the other paper makers manufactured 85-to-97% chrysotile papers and felts for decades, and they did so through the same period the Sumner Simpson papers document. That correspondence, running from 1935 forward between Raybestos-Manhattan's president and the industry's executives and lawyers, shows the asbestos industry's leadership discussing the disease hazard of its products and its preference for keeping the subject quiet, years before the workers cutting felt and millboard were told anything at all. The companies selling near-pure asbestos sheet for hand fabrication were part of an industry whose own files show it knew what its fiber did.

That combination, near-pure asbestos products sold for hand cutting, government-documented fiber release from the intended use, and an industry paper trail on the hazard, is why these cases don't depend on reconstructing what any one worker was told. The record speaks for itself.

Who was exposed

Paper products weren't tied to one trade; they followed the floors, roofs, pipes, and wiring into every kind of building. Rather than retell each worker's story here, this page hands that off to the pages that own it:

• flooring installers, who cut and tore out asbestos flooring felt under sheet vinyl and linoleum
• roofers, who cut, laid, and stripped asbestos roofing felt
• pipefitters and plumbers, who cut their own gaskets from gasket paper and worked millboard around hot equipment
• electricians, who handled electrical insulating paper in motors, panels, and appliance work

If you or your family member did any of that work, the exposure history is usually easy to reconstruct.

The manufacturers and the trusts

The paper-products category has an unusual shape: every one of its major makers has been through asbestos bankruptcy, and every one of them now pays claims through a trust. That's good news for families, because trust claims are a paper process, resolved by documentation rather than by litigation, and a single career that touched felts, papers, and millboard often supports filings against several trusts at once. Premises lawsuits against the plants and sites that controlled the work remain available alongside the trusts where the facts support them, and one pathway doesn't reduce another.

Which trusts apply to a given work history, and whether a premises or other defendant can also be reached, is an analysis we run for every client file; you don't need to sort out the corporate history yourself.

Sources of compensation

A paper-products case usually draws from several sources at once, and they run in parallel:

• Asbestos bankruptcy trusts. The makers who went bankrupt set aside money to pay the people they harmed. These are paper claims, with no lawsuit and no courtroom, and one career often supports filings against several trusts. How asbestos trust claims work.
• Product-liability lawsuits. Where a solvent maker or supplier can be identified for a particular product, it can be sued directly, under the duty to warn established in the foundational asbestos case, Borel v. Fibreboard⁴. How product liability lawsuits work.
• Premises liability against site owners. The plants, mills, and construction sites that controlled the worksite can be held responsible for the conditions they allowed. How premises liability claims work.
• Federal and disability benefits. Military service can support VA disability benefits, and civilian shipyard work can support Longshore (Longshore and Harbor Workers' Compensation Act) benefits, both paid in addition to the rest. How asbestos disability and benefit claims work.

The defense arguments in paper-product cases follow a familiar pattern, and none is new to us. All of this applies only to the lawsuit side. Trust claims are a paper process: no opposing lawyer raises defenses, no one is deposed, and no one goes to court.