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Hey, good morning. Patricia Murphy here.

It's Saturday.

This is Seattle now.

Today we're bringing you the best from the KUOW Newsroom.

First, one of Seattle's oldest businesses is also one of its biggest polluters.

The Ash Grove Cement plant is hard to miss if you ever go over the West Seattle Bridge. Every day, the plant burns natural gas and thousands of old tires for fuel. Some neighbors are fighting the plant's push to burn more tires. John Ryan has more.

The Ash Grove Cement Plant has been on the banks of the Duwamish River for nearly a century. In recent years, community groups in the area have been clashing with the plant over its air pollution.

Late last year, the Duamish River Community Coalition protested outside the offices of the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency. The Duamish Valley has some of the region's highest rates of childhood asthma and some of the worst air pollution.

The activists were hoping to influence the agency's decision on a permit to let Ashgrove increase its tire burning.

To heat up its cement kiln, the plant burns natural gas and more than a million tires a year.

The protest targeted the company's request to use tires for more than a third of its fuel.

Mia Ayala Marshall is with the Duwamish coalition.

Tires we know are bad for the air,

the air pollution. It can emit toxic pollutants like dioxins and pherons and mercury, which are

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