There is plenty of asbestos at the bottom. The case of magnesite raw material contaminated with asbestos fibres.

Although all six asbestos minerals (the layer silicate chrysotile and five chain silicate species actinolite asbestos, amosite, anthophyllite asbestos, crocidolite and tremolite asbestos) are classified as carcinogenic, chrysotile is still mined and used in many countries worldwide. Other countries, like Italy, impose zero tolerance for all asbestos species, but conflicting views repress the development of globally uniform treaties controlling international trade of asbestos-containing materials. Hence, countries with more severe legislations against the use of these hazardous materials lack of an international safety net against importation of non-compliant products. This research reports the first discovery of commercial magnesite raw materials contaminated with white asbestos (chrysotile). X-ray powder diffraction and thermogravimetric/thermodifferential measurements showed the presence of serpentine group minerals in both the semi-processed (powder) and quarried material. The univocal identification of chrysotile in the powders was confirmed by its peculiar Raman bands of the OH stretching vibrations between 3500 and 3800 cm

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Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper. The authors wish to state that the commercial samples analysed in this study were provided by Italian suppliers and end-users and considered representative of batches present in the manufacture sites in Italy during the autumn period of the year 2021. Evidence of asbestos contamination from this work is intended only for the analysed samples and, in the absence of further experimental data, should be regarded as accidental. Under no circumstances should the results of this study be generalized in space and time and considered valid for other commercial magnesite samples.