International

Austria's Asbestos Quarries: Documented for Decades, Spread Across Two Countries

Asbestos-bearing rock from four quarries in the Austrian province of Burgenland was crushed into gravel and spread across roads, railway platforms, a hospital forecourt, a kindergarten and children’s playgrounds — and exported by the millions of tonnes into western Hungary. The hazard was flagged to Austrian authorities as early as 1979 and measured in a quarry in 1994. The quarries were not closed until 2 January 2026.

Flagged in 1979, measured in 1994 — closed in 2026

The paper trail is the heart of this story. The first quarry-specific proof is dated 1994, when the Graz electron-microscopy centre (ZFE Graz), commissioned by the Burgenland provincial government, found the asbestos limit “clearly exceeded” in rock from the Bernstein quarry, identifying chrysotile and actinolite. A federal environment-ministry letter in 1995 warned that the gravel endangered “not only workers but also users.” More warnings followed: a 1999 administrative-court ruling, a 2006 geological study, and in 2008 a federal recall — ordered by then consumer-protection minister Erwin Buchinger — of 25-kilogram bags of road grit from the Rumpersdorf (Postmann) quarry sold between 2006 and 2008. According to the Vienna weekly Falter, which obtained the closure files, asbestos was a standing “taboo” at the annual quarry inspections: known, but unmeasured and unspoken (Falter, 24 March 2026).

The environmental signal is older still. In the town of Rechnitz, researchers from Vienna’s University of Natural Resources (BOKU) measured 3,350 asbestos fibres per cubic metre in open ambient air on 15 April 1979. A study reported the following year examined 300 Rechnitz residents against a 600-person control group from other municipalities and found pleural plaques — a marker of asbestos exposure — in 10% of the Rechnitz cohort and in none of the control group (Falter, 10 April 2026; corroborated by Telex/G7). What stands out is that none of those decades of warnings triggered the closures. The decisive step came almost by accident: in the summer of 2025, while one quarry was applying to expand its operation, an official set up a simple dust-collection device nearby — the kind that catches settling dust so it can be sent to a lab — and the dust turned out to contain high levels of asbestos fibres. Only then did the authorities take rock samples, in November 2025, find asbestos in them, and close the four quarries on 2 January 2026 (per the closure files obtained by Falter).

The four quarries — and who runs them

On 2 January 2026 the district authorities of Oberwart and Oberpullendorf closed four serpentinite quarries under Austria’s mining law (§ 175 MinroG) as an imminent-danger measure. Naming the operators, with sources (Falter, 24 March 2026; the Greenpeace Austria factsheet, 23 January 2026; and the business outlet Telex/G7, 27 May 2026):

The asbestos is naturally occurring (NOA): the serpentinite contains chrysotile and, significantly, amphibole asbestos — tremolite and actinolite. Greenpeace’s laboratory analysis found amphibole (tremolite) in all nine samples; the state’s own closure sampling reported asbestos contents of roughly 2–100% depending on the quarry. Mineralogist Tamás Weiszburg of Eötvös Loránd University told Telex that amphibole is “roughly a hundred times more carcinogenic than chrysotile” (Telex, 27 April 2026) — an expert characterisation, not a settled constant, but one that explains the concern.

The operators dispute the closures. The Pilgersdorf site manager told Falter: “I doubt the district authority’s reports … there is certainly not 50% asbestos in the ground here.” Hermann Mayer Ges.m.b.H. and Klöcher Baugesellschaft m.b.H. declined to comment to Falter; none of the firms answered when Telex/G7 asked whether they would accept liability. In late January 2026 the operators jointly called the state’s and Greenpeace’s sampling “unscientific” and the closures unjustified, and applied for trial operation (Der Standard, 27 January 2026). Whether the companies knew is contested: Greenpeace contends it is “simply impossible” they did not, while Weiszburg points more cautiously to industry-wide negligence; Austrian criminal investigations are open and there have been no convictions.

Where the rock ended up: a hospital, a kindergarten, playgrounds

The most striking findings are the civilian sites — documented mainly by Greenpeace’s laboratory sampling and by media on the ground. According to Greenpeace’s lab analysis, asbestos-bearing grit was found in front of Oberwart Hospital (over 50% in a sample on Dornburggasse) and at the Rechnitz skate park / pump-track (over 50%, amphibole). Falter documented fist-sized gravel forming a circle in front of a daycare in Oberwart. ORF Burgenland reported that a playground in Ollersdorf was closed after Greenpeace found asbestos in its boundary stones, and that Greenpeace detected actinolite asbestos at a playground in Kotezicken. A McDonald’s cleared a gravel bed after asbestos was reported (Falter; Index). The federal railway ÖBB removed gravel from the Winden and Breitenbrunn station platforms after Greenpeace tests showed over 50% asbestos (ORF Burgenland). The provincial Task Force, led by environmental physicians Hans-Peter Hutter and Hanns Moshammer (MedUni Vienna), counters that its 66 ambient-air measurement points stayed within normal ranges and below its guideline value of 1,000 fibres/m³, and that there is “no acute danger” — a reassurance critics note rests on a self-chosen value and on measurements taken in damp winter conditions.

Across the border: Hungary

The contaminated rock did not stay in Austria. Drawing on Hungarian customs (NAV) freight data — compiled into a public map by Bük councillor Martin Németh and analysed by Telex/G7 — about 2.8 million tonnes of Austrian stone and gravel were imported into Hungary between 1998 and 2025 (Telex/G7, 27 May 2026). The story broke publicly on 13–14 April 2026 when the Vas county authorities and the mayor of Szombathely, András Nemény, disclosed asbestos in the road base of the Oladi-plató district — six of the first twelve samples, with airborne readings reported up to 292,000 fibres/m³. Wider testing soon raised the count to 54 of 70 samples. Nemény filed a criminal complaint, sought a health-emergency declaration and imposed local measures (continuous road-watering, a 10 km/h limit, mask distribution, closure of affected sites).

Laboratory contamination has been confirmed in a handful of western Hungarian cities — including Szombathely, Bozsok, Sopron and Zalaegerszeg — while Euronews reported authorities investigating “more than 300 suspected sites” across the border region (Euronews, 15 May 2026). Compilations based on the customs data (for example by the asbestos-testing firm ungiftig.at) put the number of municipalities the quarries delivered to since 2015 at more than 250 across up to eight counties — a delivery-address count, not confirmed contamination. The Hungarian government, under prime minister Péter Magyar (sworn in 9 May 2026), ordered the clean-up by decree, with the state assuming costs; Zalaegerszeg (mayor Zoltán Balaicz) received emergency funds to seal a contaminated car park, and the railway GYSEV closed affected areas in June 2026.

The loophole that keeps asbestos rock legal

The case exposes a gap in EU law. The asbestos ban under REACH (Annex XVII, entry 6) prohibits asbestos fibres and articles “to which they are added intentionally.” The European Commission confirmed back in 2012 that naturally occurring minerals containing asbestos — serpentine rock among them — are not banned, because the fibres are not intentionally added (answer to parliamentary question E-008194/2012). Hazard-labelling rules apply above 0.1% asbestos by weight, but labelling is not a sales ban; and the EU’s asbestos-at-work directive, even as tightened by Directive 2023/2668, governs worker exposure, not whether contaminated aggregate may be quarried and sold. “There is of course a legal loophole,” Weiszburg told Euronews; “there is no law governing this.” The gap is recognised in Brussels — in late 2024 the European Chemicals Agency ran a call for evidence, led by the Netherlands, on “natural minerals with non-intentional presence of asbestos” — but that is a preparatory step, not yet a proposed law.

The cost — and a still-operating quarry exercise

Greenpeace Austria calculated on 12 June 2026 that the scandal will cost at least €1.6 billion — but this is an advocacy estimate covering material damage only (disposal and remediation, explicitly excluding health costs), and it assumes an optimistic €50 per tonne for disposal that Greenpeace says could double. Greenpeace separately estimates that around 50 million tonnes of potentially asbestos-bearing rock were extracted in the region since 1990. These figures are Greenpeace’s; no official cost estimate had been published at the time of writing.

One episode shows how late the response came. In October 2025 — while the Pilgersdorf quarry was still licensed and operating — a regional civil-protection exercise was held inside it with 447 participants, including 27 schoolchildren, reportedly without respiratory protection. Greenpeace Austria filed a criminal complaint over it with the Eisenstadt prosecutor in April 2026, naming the operator, the district authority and provincial councillor Heinrich Dorner; the province rejected the accusation, stating that sampling only took place the following month, and Dorner signalled he might sue for defamation. A separate criminal investigation is under way in Hungary.

How this echoes the Berlin case

This is, at its core, a Berlin investigation — and the Austrian case matters to us because it follows the same sequence we document at home: a hazard known for years, disclosed to almost no one, met with official reassurance, sitting in a hole in the law, with the people exposed never told. In Berlin, the seven state-owned housing companies report an estimated 58,847 asbestos-contaminated or -suspect apartments (parliamentary record Drs. 19/25 368, December 2025); the largest landlord, degewo, has known in writing since 2000; and a 2018 Berlin Regional Court judgment confirmed a landlord’s duty to disclose since at least 1993 — yet Germany still has no asbestos register and no duty to inform tenants. The materials differ — bound asbestos in homes versus natural asbestos in quarried stone — but the pattern, and the regulatory gap, do not. We document the Berlin side in the concealment pattern and the criminal case.

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