ASBESTOS is one of the big hazards of our age, lurking in our rooves, our houses and our businesses as a toxic reminder of the practices of decades past.
However, it is by no means the first, the only or the last big environmental and health hazard to be part of our everyday lives.
Despite the past use of materials such as asbestos teaching us the hard way to be cautious about what we expose ourselves to, the lesson has not been learned.
In Australia and all over the world, commerce and convenience continues to be put before health and environmental standards again and again.
We use poisons in our food, in our building products, in numerous products from shampoo to air freshener, and continue to ignore their deleterious effects because it is convenient to do so, and because we have a skewed perspective of what is hygienic, what is nice to live in, what is easy.
These issues will keep coming back to bite us again and again in the future until we choose as an entire people to be mindful of what we consume and to not use things which poison us in the first place.
