In the spring of 2005, Georgia-Pacific Corp. found itself facing nearly $1 billion in liability from a product it hadn’t made in nearly three decades: a putty-like building material, known as joint compound, containing the cancer-causing mineral asbestos.
Named in more than 60,000 legal claims, Atlanta-based
Georgia-Pacific sought salvation in a secret research program it launched in hopes of exonerating its product as a carcinogen, court records obtained by the Center for Public Integrity show. It hired consultants known for their defense work to conduct studies and publish the results, with input from the company’s legal department — and is attempting to keep key information hidden from plaintiffs.
In January 2006, Georgia-Pacific contracted with David Bernstein, an American-born toxicologist based in Switzerland, to oversee animal tests. It also hired the consulting firms
Exponent and
Environ to gauge the accuracy of decades-old studies, like those done by Mt. Sinai, showing high fiber counts associated with the sanding and sweeping of joint compound.
The consultants were known for their litigation defense work. Exponent and Environ — paid $3.3 million and $1.5 million, respectively, by Georgia-Pacific — specialized in exposure reconstruction in product-liability lawsuits. Exponent scientists, for example, had been retained by automakers in litigation with mesothelioma victims who claimed they’d gotten sick after being exposed to asbestos during brake work. The scientists’ position: grinding or otherwise tinkering with brakes couldn’t produce enough fiber-laden dust to cause disease.
Bernstein, who declined to comment for this article, had directed asbestos inhalation experiments on rats for Union Carbide and a Brazilian mining company. The tests, he reported, had shown that fibers found in chrysotile, the only type of asbestos sold in recent years, were cleared quickly by the rats’ lungs and therefore unlikely to cause cancer.
Bernstein, who had been a tobacco industry consultant before turning to asbestos, discussed his “biopersistence” theory in a 2007 trial
In field and chamber studies, Exponent and Environ researchers tried to determine if intense worker dust exposures reported in the 1970s had been overstated.
The implication: conditions for drywall workers in the 1970s may not have been as dire as the Mt. Sinai team indicated. An Exponent vice president, Angela Meyer, declined to comment on the firm’s work for Georgia-Pacific.