GE Peterborough has disputed selling asbestos to former workers. Now, it´s quietly removing it from their homes
(The Star Television)

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 ...