Owens Corning: Kaylo Asbestos Insulation History & Liability

Company History & the Kaylo Product Line

Owens Corning was incorporated in 1938 as a joint venture between Owens-Illinois Glass Company and Corning Glass Works. Created primarily to commercialize fiberglass insulation and reinforcement materials, the company grew rapidly during World War II supplying insulating products for military construction and shipbuilding. By the postwar industrial boom, Owens Corning was one of the most recognizable names in the American insulation industry, with nationwide distribution networks and long-term supply relationships with the contractors who insulated the country’s power plants, refineries, and chemical processing facilities.

The Kaylo product line was not invented by Owens Corning. Kaylo was originally developed and manufactured by Owens-Illinois — a separate corporation that shared a portion of Owens Corning’s founding ownership structure — beginning around 1948. Owens-Illinois marketed Kaylo as a high-temperature calcium-silicate insulation designed for industrial pipe and equipment applications. The product was reinforced with asbestos fiber, primarily amosite (brown asbestos) and chrysotile (white asbestos), to improve its structural integrity and thermal stability at operating temperatures exceeding 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit. Early Kaylo formulations contained between 15 and 25 percent asbestos by weight — a concentration that, when the material was sawed or shaped on a job site, produced dense clouds of respirable asbestos fibers in the immediate breathing zones of installation workers.

In 1958, Owens-Illinois sold the Kaylo product line — including manufacturing rights, equipment, customer relationships, and the trade name — to Owens Corning. From that point forward, Owens Corning manufactured and distributed Kaylo nationally, continuing to use high asbestos content in the formulation. The timing of the sale carries enormous legal significance: Owens-Illinois was aware of asbestos hazard research conducted at the Saranac Lake Laboratory as early as the late 1940s and early 1950s. Internal communications later produced in litigation indicate that the decision to divest Kaylo was at least partly motivated by growing corporate concern over the product’s long-term asbestos liability. Owens Corning, as the acquiring company, assumed both the Kaylo product line and its undisclosed history of internal safety testing showing the product caused disease.

Owens Corning continued manufacturing Kaylo for many years after the acquisition, distributing it through insulation contractors across the country and establishing it as one of the most widely specified pipe insulation products in the heavy industrial sector. Kaylo pipe covering and block insulation insulated steam lines, process piping, boiler faces, and turbine equipment in power generation stations, oil refineries, petrochemical processing plants, paper mills, steel mills, and naval shipyards from the late 1950s through the early 1970s. For the heat and frost insulators represented by union locals throughout the United States, Kaylo was one of the most frequently encountered products in the trade throughout this period.

The Fibreboard Corporation dimension of Owens Corning’s asbestos liability stems from a separate corporate transaction. Fibreboard, a California-based manufacturer operating under the Pabco brand, had produced asbestos insulation products and faced massive personal injury litigation through the 1980s and 1990s. In the mid-1990s, Owens Corning entered into complex indemnification arrangements intended to resolve Fibreboard’s asbestos liabilities. When those arrangements collapsed after appellate courts struck down certain class-action settlements, Owens Corning found itself exposed to Fibreboard’s claims alongside its own Kaylo-derived liability. The combined burden contributed to Owens Corning’s Chapter 11 filing in October 2000. After six years of reorganization proceedings, the company emerged in 2006 with an asbestos trust structured to pay both Owens Corning and Fibreboard claims for decades into the future.

Asbestos-Containing Products & Exposure Mechanisms

Owens Corning’s asbestos product portfolio was anchored by the Kaylo line, but also encompassed finishing cements and other insulation accessories marketed to the same industrial insulation trades. The Fibreboard/Pabco product line, whose liabilities Owens Corning later assumed, added a further category of asbestos products to the trust’s coverage. The following table summarizes the primary products, their asbestos content, how workers were exposed, and the industries most commonly affected.

Because Kaylo was sold in rigid pre-formed sections requiring on-site cutting and shaping, insulators and pipe coverers generated the highest personal exposures of any trade. Industrial hygiene studies conducted in the 1960s and 1970s documented fiber counts in the breathing zone of Kaylo-cutting insulators that exceeded any safe occupational threshold by orders of magnitude. Secondary exposure was also common: ironworkers, boilermakers, and other craft workers on active construction sites inhaled asbestos fibers drifting from insulation work in progress without any awareness they were being exposed. Maintenance workers who later disturbed aged Kaylo during repairs — drilling through it, breaking it apart, or bagging it for disposal — faced acute high-dose exposure events comparable in severity to original installation.

Manufacturing Facilities

Owens Corning operated multiple facilities where Kaylo and related asbestos insulation products were manufactured. Workers at these plants faced occupational asbestos exposure from raw fiber handling, mixing, pressing, and finishing operations. The table below covers the principal Owens Corning manufacturing sites and the Fibreboard facilities whose worker liabilities are also administered by the trust.

Workers employed directly at these manufacturing plants — including production line operators, kiln workers, maintenance mechanics, material handlers who tipped raw asbestos bales, and quality control inspectors — experienced sustained high-concentration exposure to raw asbestos fiber, which is generally more hazardous than finished-product installation exposure encountered at downstream job sites. Many former plant employees developed asbestosis, pleural disease, and lung cancer in addition to mesothelioma. Former plant employees and family members residing in the same household are potentially eligible to file claims against the trust regardless of whether they also worked at downstream installation job sites where finished Kaylo or Pabco products were applied.

What Owens Corning Knew & What Workers Were Not Told

One of the most consequential facts in the entire Owens Corning asbestos litigation is the timeline of corporate knowledge. The Saranac Lake Laboratory — a respected industrial hygiene and occupational medicine research institution in upstate New York — conducted animal inhalation studies using Kaylo dust beginning in the early 1950s, while the product was still being manufactured by Owens-Illinois. The laboratory’s findings, delivered to Owens-Illinois in formal reports issued in 1952 and 1953, demonstrated unambiguously that inhalation of Kaylo dust caused pulmonary fibrosis, nodular lesions, and other tissue changes in test animals fully consistent with asbestos-induced lung disease. The scientific conclusions required no interpretation: Kaylo was hazardous to breathe, and workers who handled it without respiratory protection were being put at serious risk of developing fatal lung disease.

Owens-Illinois did not publish those findings. It did not share them with the insulation contractors and workers installing Kaylo in refineries and power plants across the country. It did not modify the product’s asbestos formulation in response to the research. It did not add any warning label to Kaylo packaging. And then it sold the Kaylo product line to Owens Corning in 1958. The internal documents showing this suppressed knowledge were later produced through civil discovery in asbestos personal injury litigation and became some of the most cited and analytically significant exhibits in the entire history of mass tort litigation — establishing a clear evidentiary record of corporate knowledge running parallel to, and deliberately concealed from, the workers at risk.

The question of whether the suppressed Saranac Lake findings were transmitted from Owens-Illinois to Owens Corning at the time of the 1958 asset sale was itself the subject of extensive legal dispute across thousands of individual cases. Plaintiffs argued that Owens Corning took on the Kaylo line with actual or constructive knowledge of the hazard; defense counsel contested the scope of disclosures during the acquisition due diligence process. What is beyond dispute is that after acquiring Kaylo, Owens Corning continued manufacturing and distributing the product without any worker warning for many years. The company did not begin placing cautionary labels on Kaylo packaging until the early 1970s, by which time hundreds of thousands of insulators and bystander trades had already accumulated years of unrestricted, unwarned exposure.

Owens Corning participated in industry trade organizations and asbestos producer associations that, according to documents produced in litigation, engaged collectively in efforts to delay, minimize, or suppress public and regulatory acknowledgment of asbestos health hazards. Internal Owens Corning communications obtained through discovery showed that the company’s own industrial hygienists recognized the exposure hazard posed by high-dust insulation operations, but that commercial considerations overrode any internal impulse toward proactive worker protection. The delay between corporate knowledge and meaningful public warning cost enormous numbers of workers their health and, ultimately, their lives.

Fibreboard’s internal document record was equally damaging when surfaced in litigation. Discovery produced internal Fibreboard correspondence showing that company officials were aware as early as the 1940s that asbestos-containing insulation caused disease in workers, and that litigation management strategy — not worker safety — drove internal communications about product hazards. Those documents contributed directly to the explosion of mesothelioma verdicts against Fibreboard that ultimately made the company insolvent as a standalone enterprise and elevated Owens Corning’s own financial exposure to an unsustainable level, culminating in the 2000 bankruptcy filing.

For current claimants, this suppression history has practical significance beyond its moral weight. Courts and asbestos trusts have consistently treated Owens Corning and Fibreboard as defendants who possessed actual knowledge of the hazard they were concealing from workers. This finding informed the compensation levels embedded in the trust’s payment schedules and underpins full claim eligibility without requiring individual claimants to prove specific acts of negligence directed at them personally on a particular job site.

Owens Corning & Fibreboard Asbestos Trust Fund Status

When Owens Corning filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in October 2000, it joined a growing cohort of major asbestos defendants that had concluded it was impossible to manage open-ended personal injury liability through ordinary civil litigation. The bankruptcy reorganization proceeded for nearly six years, with intense adversarial proceedings over the size of the total asbestos claim population, the valuation of the company’s assets, and how the trust should be structured to treat present claimants and future victims equitably. The reorganization plan was confirmed in September 2006, and the Owens Corning/Fibreboard Asbestos Personal Injury Trust was established as the exclusive vehicle for compensating people harmed by the company’s products going forward.

The trust administers two legally distinct subfunds:

• Owens Corning Subfund: Covers personal injuries caused by exposure to products manufactured or sold by Owens Corning, including Kaylo pipe covering and block insulation, Kaylo finishing and insulating cement, and other Owens Corning-branded asbestos-containing insulation products. The current payment percentage — the fraction of a claim’s scheduled value that the trust actually disburses — is 4.7 percent. This rate is reviewed by the trust’s administrators periodically as the subfund’s assets are measured against projected future claim volume and severity.
• Fibreboard Subfund: Covers personal injuries caused by exposure to products manufactured or distributed by Fibreboard Corporation, principally Pabco brand pipe insulation, Pabco block insulation, and related Fibreboard asbestos products. The current payment percentage for the Fibreboard subfund is 3.7 percent. A claimant whose documented work history establishes exposure to products from both companies may file against both subfunds simultaneously, and the payments from each subfund are independent and cumulative — not offset against each other.

The scheduled value against which these percentages are applied varies by disease category. Mesothelioma claims carry the highest scheduled value, reflecting the disease’s severity, rapid progression, and near-universal fatality. Asbestos-related lung cancer claims with confirmed asbestos exposure documentation are compensable at significant scheduled values. Other qualifying conditions include asbestosis with documented functional impairment confirmed by pulmonary function testing, bilateral pleural disease with confirmed functional impairment, and other asbestos-related conditions meeting the trust’s medical criteria. The trust’s distribution procedures also apply age-at-diagnosis adjustments that increase scheduled values for younger claimants, reflecting greater lost earning capacity and years of life affected.

Filing a claim against either subfund requires three categories of documentation. First, a qualifying diagnosis must be established through pathology report, operative report, tissue biopsy, or imaging documentation satisfying the trust’s medical criteria for the claimed disease. Second, documented evidence of occupational exposure to a covered product must be assembled — typically through wage records, union dispatch books, Social Security earnings statements, employer payroll records, co-worker affidavits, or jobsite contractor records. Third, the claim form must be completed in the format specified by the trust’s current trust distribution procedures. An asbestos attorney experienced with this trust will handle all of these steps, evaluate the full scope of your exposure history to identify every applicable subfund and trust, and project a realistic recovery estimate before any paperwork is submitted to the administrator.

Trust claims and civil litigation against solvent defendants are not mutually exclusive in most jurisdictions. A mesothelioma plaintiff may simultaneously pursue civil lawsuits against manufacturers, distributors, premises owners, and employers who remain outside of bankruptcy, while filing trust claims against bankrupt defendants like Owens Corning and Fibreboard. In this way, a single mesothelioma case can generate recoveries from multiple independent sources — trust funds, litigation settlements, veterans’ benefits where applicable, and workers’ compensation in certain states. An experienced mesothelioma attorney will map the complete landscape of potentially responsible parties unique to your exposure history and develop a coordinated strategy that pursues every available avenue of compensation for you and your family.

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