Law & Policy

EU Asbestos Directive 2023/2668 — What Lower Workplace Limits Mean for Tenants in Berlin

The European Union has lowered the workplace asbestos exposure limit by a factor of ten. Germany implemented Directive 2023/2668 — for occupational safety. For tenants living in an estimated 58,847 asbestos-contaminated apartments owned by Berlin’s state-owned housing companies, nothing has changed.

What the directive requires

In November 2023, the European Union adopted Directive (EU) 2023/2668, amending the existing Asbestos at Work Directive 2009/148/EC. The change is significant: the permissible airborne asbestos fibre concentration at workplaces drops from 100,000 fibres per cubic metre to 10,000 — a tenfold reduction. With electron microscopy (the more sensitive measurement method, replacing phase-contrast microscopy), the value falls further to 2,000 fibres per cubic metre.

The deadline for transposition into national law was 21 December 2025. The underlying message is straightforward: what had been treated as an acceptable exposure level for decades was, in fact, far too high.

How Germany implemented it

Germany acted in two steps. On 4 December 2024, a first revision of the Gefahrstoffverordnung (Hazardous Substances Ordinance) entered into force, tightening rules for work on asbestos-containing materials. On 20 December 2025, a second revision followed, introducing permit and qualification requirements for businesses that handle asbestos. The technical rule TRGS 519 was updated accordingly in February 2025.

For workers, this is progress. Tradespeople who encounter asbestos during renovations are better protected than before. The new exposure limits apply, documentation requirements have been tightened, and BG BAU — the German construction industry’s statutory accident insurance institution — has revised its guideline on asbestos in existing buildings.

What was left out

The EU directive protects workers. It does not require Member States to inform tenants about asbestos in their homes. It does not create a notification obligation for building owners. It does not mandate an asbestos register.

Those would have been national legislative choices. An earlier draft of the German ordinance revision did include an investigation obligation for building owners — the duty to actively check for asbestos before construction work. It was removed under pressure from the property industry. The German federation of housing companies (GdW) — whose members include the Berlin state-owned landlord at the centre of this investigation — welcomed the removal as “workable”.

The outcome: anyone who works professionally on asbestos in Germany is now better protected. Anyone who lives in an apartment with asbestos-containing materials is not.

What this means for tenants in Berlin

In practical terms: nothing. Directive 2023/2668 regulates workplace exposure limits. Whether a landlord must inform tenants about asbestos in their building lies outside its scope. In Germany, there is no statutory information obligation from landlord to tenant — only a duty of care developed through case law. The Berlin Regional Court confirmed in 2018 that this landlord obligation has existed at the latest since 1993.

For the estimated 58,847 asbestos-contaminated apartments held by Berlin’s six state-owned housing companies (parliamentary record Drs. 19/25 368, December 2025), the directive means this: the European Union has tightened protection at the workplace. But whether a tenant ever learns that asbestos-containing adhesive lies beneath their floor remains entirely dependent on the landlord’s discretion.

This is the structural gap that our case study on landlord asbestos concealment documents in detail: institutional knowledge that exists, but never reaches the people living in the buildings.

France and Poland: a different path

Other EU Member States show that this is a choice, not an inevitability. France has required the Dossier Technique Amiante since 2002 — a mandatory asbestos register for every building constructed before the asbestos ban. In Poland, building owners must register asbestos with their municipality; failure to do so is a criminal offence. Both countries transposed the same EU directive — and built additional national transparency systems on top of it that extend well beyond occupational safety.

Germany has neither an asbestos register nor a notification obligation for property owners. The federal Asbestos Dialogue (2016–2018), an attempt at industry self-regulation, was described by the head of Germany’s largest landlord association as “completely without result”.

The structural gap

Directive 2023/2668 is not a shield for tenants. It is a workplace safety instrument, and a useful one: it lowered a limit that had been too high for decades. But it does not address the underlying problem — that residents have no guaranteed right to know what materials are built into the homes they live in.

The Berlin state-owned landlord at the centre of the criminal investigation we document has known, in writing, since 2000 that thousands of its apartments contain asbestos. The European Union has lowered the exposure limit. The German legislator has tightened workplace safety. But the central gap remains: there is no mechanism that brings this institutional knowledge to the people who need it most. The pattern repeats across decades, across companies, and — the international comparison shows — across countries that have chosen not to build the transparency systems France and Poland have.

Outlook 2028: the EU is not finished

The current EU workplace limit of 0.01 fibres per cubic centimetre is not the endpoint. According to the directive’s built-in revision clause, the limit is scheduled to drop further to 0.002 fibres per cubic centimetre by 2028 — a further fivefold tightening. In parallel, under the Cypriot Council Presidency in 2026, the sixth revision of Directive 2004/37/EC on carcinogens, mutagens and reprotoxic substances at work is under way. The European Commission is also expected to publish a draft REACH modernisation in the summer of 2026.

The direction of travel is clear: today’s limit value will be considered outdated tomorrow. But for tenants in Berlin’s asbestos-contaminated apartments, the same structural gap persists. Workplace protection becomes more stringent; the landlord’s duty to inform the people in the building does not.

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