How To Tell If Floor Tiles Have Asbestos

The mastic itself usually has asbestos in it.

How to tell if floor tiles have asbestos.

Armstrong produced the excelon tile series beginning with a plastic asbestos floor tile series in 1954 referring to the product as vinyl plastic asbestos floor tiles beginning in 1955 and vinyl asbestos tiles from 1957 to 1980. You can t see it if the floor is intact but you can spot the black adhesive if some of the tiles have already popped off the floor. Possible signs of asbestos mastic include discoloration and an oily texture. Vinyl is a type of plastic that has long been a popular material for floor tiles and sheets.

In floor tiles asbestos is used primarily for its insulation properties and its ability to resist fire in addition to the tiles themselves a layer of mastic a type of adhesive below the tiles is also likely to contain asbestos. Asbestos in floor tiles. Resilient sheet flooring containing asbestos was also produced finding wide use as early as 1968. But that changes as soon as you decide to remove it.

Asbestos flooring often has black mastic which is a type of adhesive on the back. The definitive way to find out if tiles contain asbestos is to have them tested. You can either engage an asbestos remediation expert or obtain a test kit for. Age of floor tiles if the building you live in or the one in which you work was constructed before the 1980s and particularly in the period between 1950 and the 1980s there s a high probability that your flooring contains asbestos as the interval matches the times of intense use of the mineral in building materials.

As you can see this method is not an exact science. Unlike many asbestos containing materials vinyl asbestos flooring is generally safe to be around. Identifying asbestos floor tiles. The tiles may have asbestos too.

If the tiles or the floor beneath show oily discoloration the tiles very likely contain asbestos. One of the main ingredients used in old asbestos tiles was asphalt so they were primarily made in dark colors only. Mastic is a type of glue used to adhere tiles and vinyl flooring to the subfloor. Step 3 date the tiles.

If your building was built before 1980 mastic mixed with asbestos may have been used to seal your tiles to the floor.