On 4 July 2026, Telex published a guest essay by two geologists of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA): "A velünk élő azbeszt" ("The asbestos that lives with us"; Demény and Németh 2026). The authors write as basic researchers of the Academy; they belong neither to an involved authority nor to an NGO nor to an operator. They present their own new electron-microscope observations on serpentinite and tremolite from the Bernstein and Schlaining area. This post summarises what they show, how robust it is, and where it touches our Burgenland coverage. The translations from Hungarian are ours; the original passages are in the fold-outs.
Who is writing
Attila Demény is a full member of the MTA and a research professor; Péter Németh holds the Doctor of the MTA degree and is a research professor; both work at the Institute for Geology and Geochemistry of the HUN-REN Research Centre for Astronomy and Earth Sciences in Budapest (Demény and Németh 2026, author line).
More important for context than the titles is the back story: Demény studied the serpentinites of precisely this region back in 2007, together with Torsten Vennemann (Lausanne) and Friedrich Koller (University of Vienna), in a stable-isotope study of the Penninic ophiolites of the Kőszeg–Rechnitz series (Demény et al. 2007). Koller is the same Viennese petrologist whose assessment of the differing asbestos content of individual quarries we quote on the Burgenland page; and the 2007 study's sample list explicitly includes a tremolite vein from the Böhm quarry as well as tremolite from Glashütten bei Schlaining. Tremolite at precisely these localities has thus been documented in the literature since 2007. According to the authors, the samples for the new images come from the collections of that earlier research. The material was thus in the archive long before the affair began; it was not selected for the current debate.
What was examined
Three sample sets, one instrument: a scanning electron microscope (SEM) at up to 50,000x magnification, which determines the chemical composition of microscopic particles alongside imaging (Demény and Németh 2026). The authors examined broken pieces of serpentinite from the Bienenhütte quarry east of Bernstein, fragments and powder of a tremolite vein in the serpentinite of the Böhm quarry north of Bernstein, and serpentinite and tremolite from the Glashütten bei Schlaining locality (Hungarian: Szalónakhuta).
On the geography, to avoid any mix-up: Bienenhütte and Böhm are localities near Bernstein; whether and how they relate to the Bernstein operation that has been closed by the authorities since January 2026 is not stated in the article. Glashütten bei Schlaining is the cadastral municipality that also contains the closed Postmann quarry; the samples examined come from the older research collections, not from ongoing production.
The core observation
"The analyses show unambiguously: even cutting the rock produces dust in which needles and fibres smaller than 1 micrometre (one thousandth of a millimetre) occur; grinding, by contrast, produces such needles and fibres en masse." (Demény and Németh 2026, our translation)
Original (Hungarian)
"A vizsgálatok egyértelműen kimutatják, hogy daraboláskor is képződik olyan por, amiben 1 mikrométernél (a milliméter ezredrésze) kisebb tűk és szálak jönnek létre, a porítás viszont tömegesen produkál ilyen tűket és szálakat."
At the same time, the authors stress the other half of the picture: there is no need to fear the rock in large pieces or the beautiful serpentinite objects sold as décor in Bernstein; the inhalation and health risk rises where dust can form. That matches the baseline of our coverage and the geological record we document in detail in our post on the Rechnitz Window: the problem is not the occurrence, it is dust-generating processing and use.
The authors are remarkably concrete in rebutting an argument that, according to their text, the owner of one of the quarries had made in media reports: that people breathe air, not stones. For chunks of rock that is true, Demény and Németh write, but fibres below 1 micrometre are carried by the air and are very much inhalable.
Original (Hungarian)
"Híradásokban megjelent, hogy az egyik kőfejtő tulajdonosa azzal érvelt, hogy az emberek levegőt lélegeznek be és nem követ, ami a darabok esetében igaz, viszont az 1 mikrométernél kisebb szálakat a levegő már szállítja és igenis belélegezhető."
The everyday case: a decorative stone
The article recounts a case from the authors' private circle: a family member bought a decorative stone block that one of the authors judged to be serpentinite from a photo alone. SEM analysis of a sample simply scraped off the surface showed serpentine mineral containing needles and fibres below 1 micrometre at high magnification (Demény and Németh 2026).
The authors' practical warnings: do not drill, cut or grind such a stone dry and without protective equipment; do not pour out the slurry from wet cutting, because once dried it dusts again; and simple FFP1 or FFP2 masks, they write, do not stop fibres of this size. For context: the German asbestos code TRGS 519 grades respiratory protection by the airborne fibre concentration. In the lowest band (10,000 to 100,000 fibres/m³) it permits FFP2 or P2 half masks; only from 100,000 fibres/m³ does it require FFP3 or P3 (BAuA, TRGS 519, number 9.2). The authors' assessment thus concerns precisely the mask class that the code permits in the lowest concentration band. For private individuals the standing recommendation remains not to work suspect material at all (see the guidance on the Burgenland page).
Why "where is this stone from?" is so hard to answer
A separate section of the article addresses the provenance question. The argument: the upper mantle, from which the oceanic parent rocks derive, is chemically rather homogeneous, and so is seawater; serpentinites around the world are therefore similar to one another. Later metamorphic and hydrothermal overprints do create differences, but attributing an origin would require the complete mineralogical and geochemical characterisation of every candidate occurrence in the Alps, Carpathians and Balkans, for which the resources do not exist. The weaker question, "could the material come from locality X?", is more answerable, but often without an unambiguous result (Demény and Németh 2026).
That is the geochemical background against which the Vienna asphalt finding of 1 July should also be read: Greenpeace suspects the closed Burgenland quarries as the origin, but that is not established. By the logic of Demény and Németh, a purely mineralogical attribution is likely to remain difficult; delivery notes and customs data are the more promising route.
What the authors demand
Individual stones cannot be tested at scale, whole quarries can: the authors call for mandatory quality certificates at quarry level, based on geological, mineralogical and geochemical analysis, and for an end to uncontrolled rock imports. They also point beyond asbestos: natural hydrothermal overprinting can endow inconspicuous rocks such as basalt or andesite with radioactive elements or toxic heavy metals. Their conclusion: do not fear nature, learn from the current case and prevent harm through scientific testing (Demény and Németh 2026). An existing regulatory model in this direction, California's CARB rule for serpentine aggregate, is described on our standards page.
What this text establishes, and what it does not
What it establishes, in the sense of an independent observation: cutting and, above all, grinding serpentinite and tremolite from these localities releases fibres below 1 micrometre. The observation is qualitative; the text gives no mass fractions or percentages, and it is not a peer-reviewed paper but a guest essay by two established specialists reporting their own measurements. The underlying regional expertise is published in peer-reviewed form (Demény et al. 2007).
The article does not deal with the official closures, with specific commercial products, with air measurements or with limit values; it does, however, name the quarries of Rumpersdorf and Bernstein as the largest and best-known occurrences of the region. Two connections to our coverage are nevertheless obvious. First: grinding as a form of processing is exactly the case of our Finding 3, the TerraDiabas® rock flour milled from the diabase of the Burg quarry (tremolite, mass class 3), albeit a different rock type of the same geological unit. Second: fibres with diameters below 1 micrometre are demanding to measure; the EU asbestos directive 2023/2668 explicitly distinguishes by thin fibres for the workplace limit applying from 21 December 2029: 0.002 fibres/cm³ without thin fibres, or 0.01 fibres/cm³ including thin fibres (width below 0.2 µm). The details are on our standards page.
Sources
- Demény, A. and Németh, P. (2026): A velünk élő azbeszt. Telex, 4 July 2026. telex.hu
- Demény, A., Vennemann, T. W. & Koller, F. (2007): Stable isotope compositions of the Penninic ophiolites of the Kőszeg–Rechnitz series. Central European Geology 50(1):29–46. doi.org/10.1556/CEuGeol.50.2007.1.3
- TRGS 519 – Asbestos: demolition, remediation and maintenance work. Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (BAuA). baua.de
- Directive (EU) 2023/2668 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 November 2023 amending Directive 2009/148/EC on the protection of workers from the risks related to exposure to asbestos at work. eur-lex.europa.eu
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