I freaked when I first read this. Apparently in the late 90s they quit using the mine shown to have asbestos mixed with it. For some years there may have been old bags on the shelves, but by now the chances are your vermiculite is clean. Someone else may have other information, but I first read it after starting all my seeds by covering with vermiculite, and my research calmed me down.

AmyinOwasso,

Thanks, just curious.

I still avoid vermiculite. It may be in some potting mixes that I can't avoid, but I choose perlite if I can. There are rocks that are not called asbestos but are close. I figure it is best to avoid anything that can be found with asbestos. I may be wrong but I don't quite understand it and prefer to err on the side of safety.

I try to keep cloves, surgical mask, ear plugs and safety glasses in a draw in my shop, marked "safety", and ask anyone that may be working here to use the needed equipment. It is most often one of my kids or grand kids, but they all know how I feel about safety. I mix the potting mixes but If I were to ask one of them to do it, I would ask that they use gloves, mask and maybe safety glasses and to get it damp first. That sounds like an overkill, but I am trying to teach them that some mistakes have everlasting effects. There is something in some potting soils I I am allergic to and expect others may be also.

Thanks all,

I too try to err on the side of safety.

I have used coco coir in place of vermiculite and the soil really loves it. I used the large compressed bricks that expand with water and this was not the finer ground version. I think the larger chips are better because it breaks down fairly quickly in my soil. That spot is still the best garden dirt I have.

Coco coir may contain a lot of salt and require washing.

It became a well-known issue maybe 20-25 years ago although I think that from what I remember, the problem mine stopped mining and selling vermiculite. Then, for quite a while (and I mean several years at least), you couldn't get vermiculite even if you wanted it because that mine had been the main source of vermiculite in the USA. At that point, most companies that produced and sold soil-less mixes, including some of those sold as "Potting Soil", although they do not, technically, contain any soil, were reformulated with perlite taking the place of vermiculite. I haven't seen any sort of mix sold in recent years that contains vermiculite. The ones I use all contain perlite or, in more recent years, some have replaced perlite with coir. Some bagged mixes may have both perlite and coir. I do occasionally see a bag of vermiculite in a nursery, garden center or farm store, but I've never bought any of it. The vermiculite sold nowadays generally is mined in China and it isn't, or isn't supposed to be, contaminated with asbestos.

On the scale of things I worry about, this doesn't rank really high, but then of course, that's because I haven't used vermiculite or anything containing vermiculite in the last couple of decades. It wouldn't bother me to use the vermiculite that now is imported from China if I felt I had a need for vermiculite, but I've never used it much anyhow, so I don't miss it. If I bought a bag of soil-less mix and brought it home and discovered it had vermiculite in it, I'd go ahead and use it. And, as Larry noted, everyone should always wear gloves when handling any bagged product sold as a potting soil, soil-less mix or soil amendment because various nasty diseases, including bacterial diseases, some fungal diseases that are hard to get rid of if they infect your skin, and even a form of Legionnaire's disease can be transmitted from the bagged products to humans who handle them without wearing protective gloves.

I've never been crazy about wearing gloves. I like the feeling of soil on my skin, and walking barefoot in freshly tilled soil is one of the great pleasures of spring, but I do wear gloves when working with soil amendments and with any bagged soil-less mix or amendment. I just think it is smart to be reasonably cautious, so I've learned to wear garden gloves most of the time when gardening.

I'm more of a compost and coir person, and if I need to add something else that's not compost, coir or pine bark fines to improve soil drainage in raised beds, I'd likely use expanded shale, haydite, turface or something similar instead of vermiculite anyway. I'd base the decision about which one of those to use on the type of soil I was starting with in the first place because we have everything from dense red clay to sandy clay to sandy-silty soil to gray clay (newly discovered this summer) at our place, and different types of soil get different types of amendments.

Dawn