Engineered stone countertops are found in kitchens nationwide, but some workers who cut them are facing a silent health crisis with a deadly toll.
URBANA, Mo. ( InvestigateTV ) — Countertops made from engineered stone are found in kitchens and bathrooms across the country. Made of crushed quartz mixed with resins and polymers, they’re marketed as being better than marble or granite.
But some workers who cut and shape these stone slabs in small local fabrication shops are becoming deathly ill from a disease called silicosis. Tyler Jordan, 31, lives in Missouri with his wife and three children. He used to work in his family’s stone fabrication shop in Colorado alongside his father, Jimmy.
“Trying to take a deep breath, there’s just a point where there’s no more,” Jordan said. “I feel like I should be able to breathe deeper, but I can’t, I can’t. It’s tight.” Jordan said he looked up to his father and planned to take over the family business someday.
That changed in spring 2022 when he started having chest tightness followed by pain. Doctors initially thought it might be cancer, but the diagnosis was something else. “And then now, looking back, cancer would have been a better outcome,” Jordan said.
Jordan was diagnosed with silicosis, a life-threatening, incurable disease. Doctors told him it came from breathing silica dust while working in his family’s shop. Silica is present in natural stones like marble and granite, but studies show engineered stone often contains far higher amounts — as high as 90%.
Much of it exists in tiny, nano-sized particles that can lodge deep in the lungs. State data in California shows more than 480 workers have been diagnosed with silicosis over the past seven years. Twenty-seven have died.
Dr. Jane Fazio of the UCLA School of Medicine treats many of these workers. She said the silica particles are extremely toxic to the lungs.
“So you’re not able to take in the amount of air that you really need to,” Fazio said. “So they really do become hard. They become essentially stone.” The lungs of silicosis patients harden, then shrink and over time stop expanding.
There is no cure. The only treatment for dying workers is often a risky double-lung transplant. California state data shows more than 50 workers have required transplants in recent years.
A 2023 study by Fazio and others found an estimated 100,000 stone fabricators in the U.S. are at potential risk for silicosis. Fazio said there’s a simple solution: ban engineered stone.
“The easy solution is to change, change the product. Ban the high silica material,” she said. But Minnesota slab manufacturer Cambria disagrees.
Micah Aberson, a company executive vice president and former president, said the responsibility lies with fabrication shops, not manufacturers.
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Source article: Some engineered stone countertop workers facing deadly lung disease from silica exposure | Source publish time: Jan 19, 2026 | Source language: en
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