PETERBOROUGH—Ernie Farris was a young boy in the mid-1940s when his dad brought home a refrigerator box full of shredded grey asbestos from his employer’s scrapyard. Together, they lined the attic of their small brick Peterborough home with the insulating material now known to be lethal.

It took another 60 years for concerns about General Electric Peterborough’s toxic legacy to air at a series of community health clinics, spurring the company to tell a local newspaper in 2004 that it had “no evidence” of ever selling scrap asbestos to workers to use as home insulation.

But a joint Toronto Star/CBC investigation has found that for the past 15 years, GE has quietly paid to remove the hazardous material from local houses — after selling asbestos collected from its shop floor to employees between the 1940s and 1974.

There is no record of public outreach about the cleanup program by the company, which ceased manufacturing at its Peterborough facility in 2018 and is currently decommissioning the site. Nor has there been outreach about the possibility the factory’s industrial waste — which contained a significantly higher asbestos content than commercially-available insulation products at the time — could be in local houses.

In response to detailed questions from the Star/CBC, including queries about why the company has never acknowledged it sold asbestos to workers or conducted any public outreach, GE spokesperson Jeff Caywood said the health and safety of employees and the public is a “top priority.”

“We will continue to work with the community and homeowners if additional material is found,” he said.

So far, the company has paid to remove asbestos from 24 homes. Given the time span over which the waste was sold out of the factory, Peterborough city councillor Keith Riel estimates the material could be in “hundreds” of other houses.

“If they’ve only done a couple of dozen, then that’s just not even the tip of the iceberg,” he said.

The remediation program is generous and can relieve homeowners of potentially six-figure costs associated with large-scale asbestos removal projects. Asbestos in homes is not dangerous if undisturbed, and only accredited professionals should remove it. The risk comes when homeowners are unaware of its location and inadvertently disturb it.

Asbestos exposure can cause mesothelioma, a rare and aggressive cancer of the membrane lining the chest, according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer. It also can cause cancers of the lung, larynx, and ovary.

“The moral and ethical thing for GE to do would be to put out a real public health notification to the people they sold that stuff to about this danger, and about how they should deal with it,” said Barry Castleman, a U.S.-based environmental consultant, who has served as an expert witness about asbestos risks in about two-dozen American trials involving GE.

GE’s Peterborough plant was once the company’s flagship facility in Canada, employing thousands of people to make some of the world’s largest motors. In 2016, the Star published an investigation into the struggle of former workers to receive compensation for diseases caused by exposure to more than 20 substances now identified as human carcinogens, used between 1940 and 1980 at the factory. This included large volumes of asbestos used to insulate wire and motor products at the plant — sometimes up to 500 lbs. a day.

General Electric has said the company has “always followed the best health and safety practices based on the best knowledge available to us at the time.”

Following the Star’s 2016 investigation, the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board re-evaluated 233 previously rejected claims for a range of chronic and sometimes terminal illnesses, overturning 71 of the denials. The same year, GE announced it would close its Peterborough site due to declining global demand for its products.

Before the company leaves, GE retiree John Lewington said there’s “a lot of stuff they need to come good about.”

Lewington started at GE in 1966 as part of its labour gang tasked with performing the dirtiest jobs in the factory. This included gathering waste asbestos, which Lewington and his co-worker Jim Dufresne told the Star/CBC would then be packed into a four-tonne truck and sold about three times a year to local homeowners.

Lewington took over as a clerk in the salvage department in 1974 and said by that time the factory was no longer selling scrap asbestos. He said he has “no doubt” records were made about workers who did purchase it in the past.

“If you bought asbestos or anything from salvage, there was a record,” Lewington said. “Nothing went out the gate unless there was a receipt.”

Aileen Hughes’s husband Morris worked at GE for 43 years, and later died of cancer — which prompted her to spearhead efforts to organize the 2004 community health clinics for former workers.

“The first week they had the intake clinic you couldn’t even get standing room, it was so packed with people because everybody wondered what was going on, why they were sick,” she said.

While Morris had never brought home scrap asbestos to insulate his own family home, Hughes knew neighbours who did. So she used the clinics to raise concerns with the factory’s broader environmental footprint. In response, GE said it was “unaware” of ever selling its waste asbestos and had “no evidence” that it had done so, according to a May 2004 Peterborough Examiner article.

Dufresne, who worked at GE for 42 years, says he was “almost shaking” with anger when he read the article. After scouring local archives, he eventually found a 1956 GE internal newsletter advertising the sale of scrap asbestos for 3 cents a bag.

“That proved they did sell it, after telling everybody they didn’t,” he said.

After the Star/CBC sent the company a recently obtained copy of the newsletter, a spokesperson said “some employees in Peterborough may have taken home surplus asbestos.”

Dr. Garry Humphreys, the city’s chief medical officer at the time of the health clinics, told the Star/CBC the health unit subsequently began referring any phone calls they received about the issue to GE for potential remediation. But he said records were not kept on the topic because it “wasn’t in our sphere.”

The city’s public health unit does have a record of one letter from 2005 sent to a local homeowner, recommending that they contact GE about possible asbestos remediation. Current chief medical officer Rosana Salvaterra said while the health unit is in constant contact with GE, whose plant occupies 8.4 hectares of Peterborough land, she didn’t know the asbestos remediation program was still operating.

“(It’s) like a best kept secret,” she said. “If the program still exists, and this was not something that I was aware of, it’s definitely something we need to make people aware of.”

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The program is still active. GE material is easily identifiable because it is up to 70 per cent chrysotile asbestos. Other commercial compounds previously used to insulate homes would usually have had between 3 and 6 per cent asbestos content. GE employs an environmental engineering consulting firm in Mississauga to test the origin of asbestos samples found in Peterborough homes.

Three homeowners the Star/CBC spoke to said they were proactively contacted by GE about the possibility the factory’s asbestos might be in their house. Two others said they contacted GE themselves after learning of the program through home inspectors.

Farris, 83, now lives just outside Peterborough. After the 2004 community health clinics, he told a local newspaper he remembered stuffing the attic of his childhood home with GE’s asbestos. In 2005, the then-owner of the house, Larry Keeley, remembers a woman he believed to be a GE representative knock on the door.

“She asked if she could come in, and so she looked around sort of furtively,” he recalls. “She came in and proceeded to tell me that my house had asbestos in it that came originally from GE.”

After the cleanup, Keeley received a letter from Roland Hosein, GE Canada’s former Vice President of Health and Safety.

“This is to inform you that asbestos-containing material originating from the GE Peterborough manufacturing facility was removed from the attic of your home,” the letter reads. “By completing this work, GE is not making any admissions of any kind.”

Farris, who worked at GE for 39 years like his father, said he thinks it’s good of the company to pick up the cost of remediating local homes, which sometimes run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. But he believes the public should be made aware of the program’s existence.

“It gives them a choice of removing the hazard or living with it,” he said.

Farris said he is unaware of any health impacts caused by asbestos, but it has left him with questions about the legacy of his childhood home.

“My mum died with what they called asthma in 1954, at age 45,” he said. “I just wonder whether it was asthma or if it was related to the asbestos.”

Keeley, who no longer owns Farris’s old house, said he rarely went into the attic and is not aware of any health complications as a result of the asbestos there, although he too developed asthma while living there.

“I’m glad I didn’t go in any more often than I did,” he said.

The negative health effects caused by asbestos were well known by the 1920s — prompting the then-president of General Electric Company Gerard Swope to commission renowned physician and occupational health pioneer Alice Hamilton to assess the potential safety hazards posed to workers in GE’s U.S. factories. As a result, a recycling system was implemented to use hoods to suck up excess asbestos and remove it from the shop floor, reducing workers’ exposure to its hazardous fibres.

GE’s Peterborough plant stopped using asbestos for its manufacturing in Canada in 1980. Caywood did not respond to a question from the Star/CBC about whether any of its other facilities may have sold scrap asbestos.

A 1942 Pennsylvania department of labour report obtained by the Star/CBC quoted a manager of GE’s York, Pa., plant as saying its asbestos recycling system helped create “saleable waste” valued at $500 a year. It’s not clear who purchased the waste.

“The business decision in (Peterborough’s) case was, ‘We’ve got this waste that we’re continuously generating and need to get rid of. Wouldn’t it be nice if we put a really nominally cheap price on it and get people to haul it away by themselves,’” Castleman said.

“From a business standpoint it made perfect sense. But from a public health point of view it was a disaster.”

Riel, who is also the former president of the union representing GE workers, said he intends to raise the issue at Peterborough city council — arguing the company has a “moral obligation” to inform local residents about the possibility its asbestos could be in their homes, and that there is financial help available.

“I’m not talking about putting some sort of scare tactic out there for the community, but I think it’s the right thing to do,” he said.

“If they were willing to do what they did for me for all the other places then they would clean up a mess that began with them in the first place,” added Keeley.

“By moving out of Peterborough you don’t move away from your liabilities.”

Peterborough residents with home queries can contact GE Canada’s Environmental Programs Information Line: 1-877-399-9599.

For more coverage, watch CBC’s The National at 10 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 17.