The hobby with hidden health risks

Stripping paint, sawing wood, drilling into walls – even the most basic DIY activities can lead to potentially fatal health conditions without proper protective equipment and training.

It started – as unpleasant revelations often do – with a late-night thought and some frantic googling.

It was 2018 and I had just moved into my first home, a one-bed flat which hadn't been renovated since it was built in the 1960s. The bathroom still contained relics of brown and yellow floral wallpaper, and the maroon carpet had long been trodden into a crusty mat. Even the estate agent had struggled to put a positive spin on its interior design.  

Armed with a circular saw and an enthusiasm for DIY wildly out of step with my natural talent, I immediately set to work eradicating the "vintage" vibe. I cut worktops to size, adapted kitchen cabinets, sliced up wooden flooring, and fitted new doors. It wasn't uncommon for the whole flat to be coated in a fine sheen of wood dust. 

Then one day, I came across a product online that I found, frankly, baffling: a protective suit for cutting wood. It consisted of a full helmet with a visor, sealed at the neck, and a filter unit that's attached to a belt at the waist. The headgear resembled something you'd wear to visit a patient with a highly contagious disease, or to visit another planet. Hold on, I wondered… why would anyone go to such lengths to protect themselves from wood?

As it happens, the answer is more than a little alarming. Though wood is generally an innocuous natural substance, something we have evolved alongside for millennia – the oldest wooden shelter is thought to have been built 500,000 years ago – when you turn it into a fine powder, the situation is very different.

In the US, wood dust is now classified as a Group 1 carcinogen, a substance known to cause cancer in humans. It's a proven culprit of asthma, allergic rhinitis, chronic bronchitis, lung cancer, and nasal cancer. In fact, furniture makers have a 500-fold excess risk of developing the latter.

Of course, woodworking professionals are generally made aware of these risks. In developed countries, employers have a legal responsibility to provide adequate training and protective equipment for their workers. There are set "safe limits" for exposure, and wearing space-suit style helmets is not unusual – if something goes wrong, irresponsible businesses can be sued.

For DIYers, on the other hand, the home is riddled with mysterious dangers that they may have neither the equipment nor the knowledge to deal with safely. We're used to hearing about gruesome incidents involving power tools and electricity – such as the 55-year-old who didn't notice he'd inadvertently embedded a nail in his skull until he started to feel sick – but there is also a silent, insidious risk of harm to our respiratory health.

At the same time, hands-on renovations have never been more popular. Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, home improvement companies around the globe have reported record sales, leading to the observation that it's created "a generation of DIYers". The unprecedented demand has hit supply chains, contributing to well-documented shortages of basic construction materials such as cement and plaster and eye-watering price hikes. So what are the hidden risks of DIY? And what can we do to shield ourselves from them?

Incognito asbestos

First up, there's asbestos – that fibrous, silicate material so esteemed by builders in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, who valued it for its impressive strength and potent fireproofing qualities. It was added to a vast array of products, from pipe insulation to roofing, and as a result, it can be extremely difficult to identify.

"While we no longer use very much of it, in the past around 4,000-5,000 products contained asbestos," says Arthur Frank, a professor of environmental and occupational health at Drexel University, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. "There's the obvious ones – building materials, roofing shingles, things like that, but many people don't realise that it's also in many plastic materials such as bowling balls and ironing board covers."

Unfortunately, even tiny quantities are potentially lethal. Asbestos is a leading cause of several harrowing conditions, including asbestosis, lung cancer and mesothelioma. "What people don't realise is that as little as one day of exposure to both humans and animals have given rise to a small number of cases of mesothelioma. And so it is a very powerful carcinogen," says Frank.

Though the sale of asbestos was widely banned in the 1990s, it lingers on in houses across the globe to this day – often hiding in unexpected places and posing as more innocuous substances. In many cases, asbestos-containing materials look identical to those without it, such as "popcorn" ceilings – texturised coatings that were fashionable in the mid- to late 20th Century as a way of concealing imperfections and muffling sound.

For years, the vast majority of asbestos-related disease was generally seen in men who had worked with the material for decades. But that is changing. Today there are a growing number of cases among DIYers, who some experts believe will be responsible for a "third wave" of asbestos deaths. 

Most of the research into DIY-related asbestos diseases comes from Australia, where asbestos was widely used in the post-war period. There were several mines across thecountry, including at the famous village of Wittenoom in Western Australia, where the deadliest type of the material was extracted until it was shut down in 1966.

The entire community around the mine has since been decommissioned, after more than 2,000 people in the area succumbed to asbestos-related illnesses. Many of them were children at the time they were exposed – disconcerting pictures from the era show them playing in sandpits of asbestos dust. (This was not uncommon – my own dad fondly remembers making shelters from abandoned asbestos sheets near his childhood home in one of the rougher parts of Scotland. In the summer, local children would crumble it to make asbestos "snow").

Exposure to asbestos during DIY projects in Australia is now a serious public health concern. In one 2013 survey of 3,612 people in New South Wales, 61.4% of those who said they had engaged in DIY projects reported being exposed to asbestos during these activities. Meanwhile an earlier study (from 2011) found that cases among this demographic were increasing, and accounted for 8.4% of all men and 35.7% of all women diagnosed with mesothelioma.