Abstract
The unique set of physical and chemical properties of asbestos has led to its many industrial applications worldwide, of which roofing and facades constitute approximately 80% of currently used asbestos-containing products. Since asbestos-containing products are harmful to human health, their use and production have been banned in many countries. To date, no research has been undertaken to estimate the total amount of asbestos–cement products used at the country level in relation to regions or other administrative units. The objective of this paper is to present a possible new solution for developing the spatial distribution of asbestos–cement products used across the country by applying the supervised machine learning algorithm, i.e., Random Forest. Based on the results of a physical inventory taken on asbestos–cement products with the use of aerial imagery, and the application of selected features, considering the socio-economic situation of Poland, i.e., population, buildings, public finance, housing economy and municipal infrastructure, wages, salaries and social security benefits, agricultural census, entities of the national economy, labor market, environment protection, area of built-up surfaces, historical belonging to annexations, and data on asbestos manufacturing plants, best Random Forest models were computed. The selection of important variables was made in the R v.3.1.0 program and supported by the Boruta algorithm. The prediction of the amount of asbestos–cement products used in communes was executed in the randomForest package. An algorithm explaining 75.85% of the variance was subsequently used to prepare the prediction map of the spatial distribution of the amount of asbestos–cement products used in Poland. The total amount was estimated at 710,278,645 m2 (7.8 million tons). Since the best model used data on built-up surfaces which are available for the whole of Europe, it is worth considering the use of the developed method in other European countries, as well as to assess the environmental risk of asbestos exposure to humans.
Highlights
Asbestos is a mineral which, due to its physical and chemical properties, has found wide application in many areas of industry and economy [1]
Asbestos fibers were mainly used in the construction industry, in which asbestos fibers were used to manufacture asbestos–cement products, constituting over 80% of the products used, which were mainly used in roofing materials and façade claddings [2]
Statistical models are used to assess the potential risk of asbestos-related diseases, e.g., pleural mesothelioma [8] or lung cancer [9], based on the total amount of asbestos fibers used in the production per country population
Summary
Asbestos is a mineral which, due to its physical and chemical properties, has found wide application in many areas of industry and economy [1]. The risk assessment of asbestos-related diseases requires detailed data on the quantity and where the asbestos–cement products are used [5,6,7]. Due to the lack of data on the quantity and the spatial distribution of asbestos–cement products used, research is undertaken to assess the risk of developing asbestos-related diseases on the basis of asbestos consumption indices in production per country’s population [10,11]. In the National Program for Asbestos Abatement in Poland [3], it was estimated that approximately 14.5 million tons of asbestos-containing products are in use These estimations were based on the approximation of data on asbestos fibers imports. The motivation behind this research is to support the decision makers who are interested in public issues concerning asbestos abatement safety for humans and the environment, as well as to support them with the overall estimation of asbestos–cement products in use in Poland to assess the environmental risk of asbestos exposure to humans
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