Home › Floors

Vinyl, lino, underlay and adhesives

Floors are where asbestos most often survives a renovation unnoticed, because it is covered over rather than removed, and where a weekend sander does the most damage.

Three layers, three separate questions

('

An old floor is not one material, it is a stack, and asbestos can sit in any layer of it independently. The vinyl or lino tile itself may contain it. The backing paper bonded to the underside of sheet vinyl is a classic case — the surface is harmless, the millboard-like backing is not. And the adhesive holding either of them down is a third, separate product with its own history.

This layering explains the most common way people are exposed at home. They lift a carpet, find old vinyl underneath, and take a floor sander or a scraper to it to get back to the boards. Sanding is the single worst option: it turns bonded material into airborne dust in an enclosed room, and it does it to the backing and the glue as much as to the tile.

The safer instinct is often the correct one: in many cases an intact old floor can simply be covered and left, with new flooring laid over the top, which is why so many Australian houses have three generations of floor stacked on each other. That is a legitimate approach rather than a dodge — provided the person who lifts it in twenty years is told what is under there.

Where a floor genuinely has to come up, the quantity involved is usually beyond what a homeowner is permitted to remove, and the dust risk is indoors rather than outdoors, which changes the calculation again.

', 0)

Floors guides

Sources

What this page explains is based on these official sources. If you check one and it does not match what you read here, send it to us and the article gets corrected.