Many job safety officials say that Hispanic immigrants, often unskilled and often here illegally, are hired disproportionately into many of the most dangerous jobs, like roofing, fruit picking and taxi driving. To read the full report click here. Under the ruling, EPA will now be required to come up with new regulations. The EPA had no immediate comment. The incinerators are used exclusively for burning hazardous waste.
Cement kilns are the furnaces that produce Portland cement, the active ingredient in concrete.
Operating at more than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, the kilns run on fuels such as coal, hazardous waste and scrap tires. Most of what cement kiln operators consider fuel-quality hazardous waste comes from industry paints, solvents and adhesives. More than 230 million tons of hazardous waste are generated by the United States each year and cement makers burn at least 1 million tons of that annually as an alternative to more expensive fuels such as coal, according to industry estimates. The EPA has been regulating incinerators for more than two decades and cement kilns for the past 10 years, soon after they came into use. In 1999, the agency issued standards limiting emissions from incinerators that destroy hazardous waste, cement kilns that use it as fuel to make cement and lightweight aggregate kilns that use it as fuel to produce concrete as a building material.