I am bidding a second story bedroom, second bath project on a older bungalow home.The area to be remodeled is present attic space.Everything looks fine structualy.My only concern is upon pulling up a floor board to inspect joist size I found a type of insulation over existing paper backed insulation.There were bags left in the joist cavities with the name of zonolite insulation on them from Grace Co.It looks the same as vermiculite and my concern is, is this insulation the same as vermiculite and does this insulation contain asbestos as I read that vermiculite does.
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Drewski: I would have to agree with you. Back in the early 60's we used a lot of Zonolite . Good Day my Man.
Is this something a licensed asbestos removal company has to be called in to remove.
Try searching on Google or another search engine under "vermiculite". I looked at a house that also had this type of insulation, and a brief search of the Internet turned up lots of data. The gist of it is that something like 85% of the vermiculite sold by W.R. Grace came from one mine that was contaminated with asbestos, and a particularly nasty form of asbestos at that. I ended up not getting the job, but there is no question that I would have had an asbestos abatement contractor deal with it.
Edited 5/7/2002 11:16:46 PM ET by Nick Pitz
Yep, asbestos
http://www.lieffcabraser.com/zonolite.htm
http://www.scn.org/~bh162/insulation.html
Phill Giles
The Unionville Woodwright
Unionville, Ontario
Thanks for the web site addresses.Now off to break the bad news to the homeowner.