The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), according the director of its Department of Environmental Sanitation and Toxic Substance Management, Lin Chien-hui, is planning on phasing asbestos out of use throughout the United States by 2020.

Currently the United States remains as one of the few developed nations that has yet to ban chrysotile asbestos, a mineral now known to be carcinogenic which was once used fervently in a wide variety of industries. The mineral boasts several inviting properties including incredible insulation, fire retardation, building compound strengthening, and ease of fabrication. As early as the 1920′s, however, asbestos was linked to serious respiratory diseases including what was then known as fibrosis, or scarring of lungs.

While asbestos industry giants thwarted efforts to uncover the substance’s dangerous properties for several decades, undeniable evidence continued to accumulate. Lawsuits were brought against asbestos companies for the first time in 1929, and medical and scientific advances continued to point to asbestos as a cancer causing agent. The EPA passed a ban on asbestos in 1989 under the Asbestos Ban and Phase Out Rule, which was overturned just two years later in the case of Corrosion Proof Fittings v. EPA. Corrosion Proof Fittings fought for the right of manufacturers to sell asbestos products, claiming that the EPA’s classification of asbestos as hazardous was ungrounded.

Today, asbestos related diseases kill some 10,000 people in the United States every year. About one quarter of those victims suffer from mesothelioma, a cancer of a specialized tissue protecting the body’s organs which is caused exclusively by asbestos. Mesothelioma is an aggressive and terminal cancer which normally causes death less than eighteen months from diagnoses.

While the general asbestos ban passed in 1989 eventually failed, asbestos regulations and restrictions tightened significantly which began raising awareness of the mineral’s toxicity. More lawsuits accumulated over time and continue to accumulate to this day, making asbestos litigation the longest and most expensive bout of corporate negligence in U.S. history.

After billions of dollars in litigation and hundreds of thousands of affected families, the United States, it appears, is nearly ready to join the ranks of nations which have completely banned the use of asbestos.

Lin Chien-hui of the EPA stated that the general ban on asbestos will be rolled out in two phases. Regulations will be put into place on July 1, 2015, to ban asbestos from sealants and sealing materials. Five years later, July 1, 2020, asbestos will be banned from construction materials such as cement, tiles, panels and more.