Armstrong World Industries

Company History & Asbestos Use

Armstrong World Industries traces its origins to a small cork-cutting shop opened by Thomas Morton Armstrong in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 1860. Armstrong sold bottle stoppers to pharmacies and then pivoted to cork insulation, gaskets, and eventually linoleum flooring. By the early twentieth century, Armstrong Cork Company — as it was known until 1980 — had become one of the largest floor covering manufacturers in the United States, with plants across the country and a brand name that was synonymous with resilient floor products.

Asbestos entered Armstrong's manufacturing process in the 1920s, driven by the same combination of economics and engineering that drew it into so many American industries. Chrysotile asbestos fibers were inexpensive, abundantly supplied from Canadian and later South American mines, and possessed remarkable properties: they resisted fire, dampened sound, added tensile strength, and remained dimensionally stable under the mechanical stress of being walked upon. For a company making floors that needed to withstand decades of foot traffic in schools, hospitals, commercial kitchens, and office buildings, asbestos was an almost ideal additive.

Armstrong's signature asbestos-containing product was the vinyl-asbestos tile, universally known by the initialism VAT. These nine-inch and twelve-inch square floor tiles were manufactured in enormous quantities beginning in the late 1940s and reached peak production during the 1950s and 1960s. The tiles were composed of a binder of polyvinyl chloride resins combined with mineral fillers and asbestos fibers — typically chrysotile — at concentrations of 20 to 30 percent by weight. The asbestos content was not incidental: it was essential to the tile's structural integrity, giving it the stiffness and crack resistance that distinguished it from purely vinyl products.

Armstrong marketed its VAT tiles under brand names including Excelon, Standard Excelon, and Corlon. These products were aggressively promoted through architect specification guides, builder catalogs, and contractor sales networks. Armstrong's Lancaster headquarters produced lavish product binders illustrating how their tiles could transform mid-century American spaces. Schools, hospitals, government buildings, military bases, and tens of millions of private homes received Armstrong floor tiles during the boom years of American construction that stretched from the late 1940s well into the 1970s.

Beyond the tiles themselves, Armstrong also manufactured asbestos-containing adhesives and mastics used to bond VAT tiles to subfloors. These products — sold under names like S-141 and S-515 — often contained chrysotile asbestos as a thixotropic agent that kept the adhesive from slumping on vertical surfaces and improved its tack. Installers who troweled these mastics by hand or spread them with notched trowels worked in close proximity to the material for hours at a time, generating dermal and inhalation exposures that were not well understood or controlled during the mid-twentieth century.

Armstrong ceiling tiles represented a second major asbestos-containing product line. The company manufactured acoustical ceiling tiles and panels for commercial and institutional use that incorporated asbestos for its fire-resistance and sound-absorption characteristics. These tiles were installed in suspended grid systems in office buildings, schools, hospitals, and retail spaces. When ceiling tiles are disturbed — by water damage, renovation, or the simple act of pushing them aside to access above-ceiling utilities — they can release asbestos fibers into occupied spaces below.

Armstrong began reformulating its products away from asbestos in the late 1970s as the regulatory environment tightened and scientific evidence about the health hazards of asbestos became impossible to ignore. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration's initial asbestos standard in 1972 and successive tightening of permissible exposure limits through the decade forced manufacturers to reckon with what their products were doing to workers. By 1983, Armstrong had largely phased asbestos out of its floor tile product line, transitioning to fiberglass and other synthetic fibers. However, by that point the company had already manufactured and sold hundreds of millions of asbestos-containing tiles that remained in place — and would remain in place for decades — in buildings across America.

The legal reckoning was slow to arrive but devastating when it did. Plaintiffs began filing asbestos personal injury claims against Armstrong in the 1970s, at first in manageable numbers, and then in a torrent. The company had faced roughly 176,000 asbestos claims by the time it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in December 2000. The bankruptcy reorganization took six years to complete, hampered by disputes between personal injury claimants and property damage claimants — building owners who argued they were entitled to compensation for the cost of remediating Armstrong products in their facilities. The plan of reorganization was confirmed in 2006, creating the Armstrong World Industries Asbestos Personal Injury Settlement Trust and establishing the framework under which victims continue to seek compensation today.

Armstrong Asbestos-Containing Products & Exposures

Armstrong manufactured a wide range of products containing asbestos over its decades of production. The following table summarizes the principal product categories, their typical asbestos content, the mechanisms by which fibers were released, and the populations most at risk of exposure.

Occupational exposure data gathered in litigation and in academic studies confirm that floor tile installers who worked regularly with Armstrong VAT products accumulated significant asbestos body burdens. Studies of tile installers have documented elevated rates of mesothelioma, asbestosis, and lung cancer compared to the general population. These findings are consistent with the understanding that the act of scoring and snapping VAT tiles — the standard installation technique — consistently generates respirable chrysotile fibers at concentrations that can exceed occupational exposure limits, particularly in enclosed spaces with limited ventilation such as residential basements and hallways.

Armstrong Manufacturing Facilities & Worker Exposure

Armstrong operated multiple manufacturing plants where asbestos was handled in raw form during the mixing and pressing of floor tile compounds. Workers at these facilities faced some of the highest exposures in the entire Armstrong exposure chain, because they worked directly with bulk asbestos fiber and with partially processed asbestos-laden materials throughout their shifts.

Internal Armstrong documents produced during litigation revealed that company industrial hygienists conducted air monitoring at several facilities dating to the 1960s and that results sometimes showed fiber concentrations exceeding the standards of the day. Workers were not always informed of these findings, respiratory protection programs were inconsistently enforced, and engineering controls such as local exhaust ventilation were not uniformly installed until regulatory pressure forced the issue in the 1970s. The take-home or para-occupational exposure pathway — whereby workers carried asbestos fibers home on their clothing and hair, exposing family members — is documented in litigation involving Armstrong plant workers' spouses and children who later developed mesothelioma despite never setting foot in a factory.

The Floor Tile Removal Hazard: Why Disturbing Old Armstrong VAT Is Still Dangerous

The approximately 30 million buildings estimated to contain Armstrong and other brands of vinyl-asbestos floor tiles represent one of the largest ongoing asbestos exposure reservoirs in the United States. Unlike asbestos pipe insulation or sprayed-on fireproofing, which were typically removed from commercial buildings during the wave of abatement projects in the 1980s and 1990s, vinyl-asbestos floor tiles were so ubiquitous and so inexpensive to install that they were often simply covered over with new flooring layers rather than removed. This means that a significant number of residential basements, kitchens, bathrooms, and school hallways still contain original Armstrong VAT tiles installed 40, 50, or 60 years ago — buried under carpeting, hardwood flooring, or additional layers of vinyl.

The hazard associated with in-place VAT tiles is not constant or inevitable. The EPA's guidance on asbestos-containing materials recognizes that intact, non-friable flooring in good condition and firmly bonded to the subfloor poses a low risk to building occupants under normal use conditions. Chrysotile asbestos fibers are tightly bound within the vinyl matrix of the tile and do not shed measurable quantities of fibers under ordinary foot traffic. The tiles become hazardous primarily when they are disturbed.

The highest-risk disturbance scenarios for old Armstrong VAT tiles are as follows. First and most dangerous is dry removal: using a floor scraper, putty knife, or similar tool to pry up old tiles without prior wetting or chemical softening. This technique — still commonly practiced by uninformed homeowners and renovation contractors — shatters tiles and generates respirable asbestos fiber concentrations that can spike dramatically above background levels. Air sampling studies have documented fiber counts exceeding 1 fiber per cubic centimeter during dry scraping of VAT tiles, a level fifty times the current OSHA permissible exposure limit of 0.1 f/cc averaged over an eight-hour shift.

Second, sanding or grinding operations present extreme hazard. Floor sanding machines — the drum sanders and orbital sanders used to refinish wood floors — will quickly abrade any VAT tiles lying beneath a thin wood overlay, generating massive fiber releases that can persist in a building's indoor air for days after the work is completed. The EPA classifies dry sanding, dry grinding, and dry buffing of VAT tiles as a Category I non-friable asbestos-containing material in a manner likely to make it friable, triggering the full regulatory requirements of the National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants (NESHAP) standard.

Third, demolition activities that involve breaking through VAT-tiled floors — jackhammering concrete slabs to which tiles are bonded, swinging sledgehammers during building teardown, or running saw blades through layered flooring systems — can generate explosive fiber releases comparable to those seen in the removal of pipe insulation.

The school and hospital setting deserves particular attention. Many of the most intense uses of Armstrong VAT tiles occurred in institutional construction during the 1950s and 1960s — precisely when post-war school construction was booming and hospital building programs were funded by the Hill-Burton Act. The EPA's 1982 survey of school buildings found asbestos-containing materials in a majority of the nation's school stock, with floor tiles being among the most common forms present. Schools that have undergone renovation without proper asbestos assessment have repeatedly created exposure incidents affecting children, teachers, and maintenance workers. Armstrong tiles have been specifically identified in litigation and regulatory actions involving school asbestos incidents in multiple states.

For property owners who suspect their building contains old Armstrong VAT tiles, the recommended course of action is to have the flooring sampled and analyzed by a certified asbestos inspector before undertaking any renovation or removal work. If VAT is confirmed, a licensed asbestos abatement contractor should perform removal under full OSHA and EPA regulatory compliance, using wet methods, HEPA vacuums, negative-pressure containment, and proper disposal in sealed, labeled containers at a licensed asbestos landfill.

Armstrong World Industries Asbestos Trust Fund

The Armstrong World Industries Asbestos Personal Injury Settlement Trust was created pursuant to Armstrong's plan of reorganization, which was confirmed by the bankruptcy court in 2006. The trust operates under the framework established by Section 524(g) of the United States Bankruptcy Code, which permits asbestos-related companies to channel all present and future asbestos personal injury claims to a dedicated trust, providing a permanent injunction protecting the reorganized company from such litigation in perpetuity. The reorganized Armstrong World Industries, now focused on ceiling systems and flooring products, continues to operate as a publicly traded company; all asbestos liability has been transferred to the trust.

The trust currently pays claimants at a payment percentage of approximately 10.8 percent of the scheduled value of each claim. The payment percentage is set by the trust's trustees based on actuarial projections of total present and future claims against the trust's available assets. The percentage is subject to periodic review and adjustment as claims experience and trust investment returns evolve; claimants and their counsel should verify the current payment percentage directly with the trust at the time of filing.

The trust uses a matrix of disease categories to determine the scheduled value of claims before applying the payment percentage. Malignant mesothelioma receives the highest scheduled value, reflecting the severity of the disease and its strong causal relationship with asbestos exposure. Lung cancer claims are also compensable, though they require evidence linking the cancer to asbestos exposure — either through a documented significant occupational exposure history or through clinical findings of asbestosis or pleural disease that bolster the causal inference. Non-malignant conditions including asbestosis, pleural thickening, and pleural plaques are compensable at lower scheduled values.

The trust offers two review pathways. Under the Expedited Review Process (ERP), claimants who meet the trust's medical criteria for their disease category and who document sufficient exposure to Armstrong products can receive a scheduled-value payment without full individual review of their medical records and exposure history. This streamlined pathway provides faster resolution at the scheduled value. Under the Individual Review Process (IRP), claimants who believe their case has characteristics that warrant a higher payment than the scheduled value — for example, a younger claimant with a longer projected life expectancy, or a claimant with exceptionally well-documented exposure — can request individualized review of their claim at the expense of a longer processing timeline.

To file a claim against the Armstrong Trust, claimants or their legal representatives must submit a claim form along with supporting documentation including: pathology reports or other medical evidence confirming the diagnosis; occupational history demonstrating exposure to Armstrong-manufactured products; medical records, employment records, and where available, co-worker affidavits or union records corroborating the exposure; and a completed authorization for release of medical records. The trust requires that claims for malignant disease be supported by pathologically confirmed diagnoses — a histological specimen reviewed by a board-certified pathologist confirming the presence and cell type of the malignancy.

Claimants have the right to file against multiple asbestos trusts if they were exposed to products from multiple manufacturers, which is the norm rather than the exception for workers who spent careers in flooring installation, construction, or industrial maintenance. An experienced asbestos attorney can identify all potentially responsible manufacturers in a claimant's exposure history and file against all applicable trusts simultaneously, substantially increasing total compensation. Attorney fees in asbestos trust cases are typically contingency-based, meaning claimants pay nothing unless they recover, and fees are usually capped at a percentage set by the trust's distribution procedures.

There is no formal filing deadline imposed by most asbestos trusts for claimants with currently diagnosed disease, but practical considerations counsel against delay: the trust's payment percentage can change, witnesses and records become harder to obtain over time, and the claimant's ability to participate in the documentation and verification process may diminish as disease progresses. Anyone who believes they may have been exposed to Armstrong products and who has received a diagnosis of mesothelioma, lung cancer, or asbestosis should consult with an asbestos attorney promptly.

Frequently Asked Questions