It is well known that asbestos is a health hazard and its progressive elimination is a priority for pollution prevention. Asbestos can be transformed into non hazardous silicate phases by means of thermal treatments. This investigation describes the recycling of microwave inertised asbestos in refractory materials of both alumina-mullite and mullite-cordierite compositions. The increase of cordierite content found in samples containing inertised asbestos should lead to an improvement in thermal shock behaviour of the refractory materials. In the case of mullite-cordierite refractories, it was found that inertised asbestos can be used as raw material to replace the currently used MgO-rich talc. No significant variation of the Young’s modulus of samples made with inertised asbestos compared to the commercial based composition was found, indicating that inertised asbestos containing refractories should behave similarly to commercial refractory materials in terms of mechanical properties.