The Ministry of Education in January ended its programme of removing slabs of asbestos cement from some 300 primary and secondary schools, which it said had run throughout 2013 and 2014.
But Carmen Lima, an expert on waste for the Quercus environmental group, said this was “only the start, with the marking out of asbestos cement materials on roofs” and that “in buildings such as schools, asbestos is certainly not only in the roof”. That, she said, means that “the work hasn’t been done as it should be [but] is incomplete” because there may be “canteens, pavements and coverings of some walls with asbestos that was not looked at for identification.”
The problem she explained, is that the survey of premises was made above all by technical staff in the ministry’s department of school establishments, by teachers and headteachers, who are able to identify slabs of asbestos cement but who “do not have the training to identify other situations”.
According to the ministry, since the programme finished it “continues to monitor all situations and intervenes whenever there is an urgent need and whenever materials that have deteriorated or are in a poor state of conservation are identified, or whenever studies on air quality demonstrate that need.”
Quercus also raised questions about the manner in which the removal of asbestos had been carried out, alleging that in some cases they were not transported in the right conditions or were dumped in ordinary landfill. The ministry says that the work was monitored by the labour inspectorate and was carried out in line with legislation.
Asbestos has been banned in the European Union since 2005 but was until 1990 widely used in roofs and other coverings because of its properties of thermal and acoustic insulation.