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PM2.5 from wood burning - your views?

FireFire Posts: 19,096
in The potting shed
There has been recent research about fine particulate matter from wood stoves. The revelations seem to come from new science rather than shifted goalposts.


PM2.5 levels are lower in the summer and higher in the winter. Yes, the state of the wood makes things even worse - wet or unseasoned wood is a disaster. Open fires are very much worse than stoves. Burning at a high temp (over 200%) makes the stove much more efficient. But it does seem that, no matter which way you cut it, stoves are detrimental to lung health and general well being, contributing to dementias , Parkinsons, COPD and many other conditions.  

I have a wood stove and am very attached to real fires. I am interested in your views on the science. If you have a stove, open fire etc do you plan to stop using it? If you have bonfires, will you now stop completely? It seems, sadly, that the relatively few people who use stoves etc are massively and disproportionately impacting national health - neighbours, family, older people, ill people. 

 - - -

"Around 1.5m homes use wood for fuel across the UK, however burning wood and coal in open fires and stoves makes up 38% of the UK's emissions of PM2.5. By comparison, 16% come from industrial combustion, 12% from road transport and 13% from the use of solvents and industrial processes."

The BMJ says

"Revised figures show domestic wood burning to be the UK’s largest single source of PM2.5 emissions, 2.4 times greater than all PM2.5 emissions from traffic."


Apparently there are 1.5 million stoves in Britain, with 200,000 are sold annually. 4,000 a year in London die from early from breathing PM2.5. "A new stove can produce about six times more particle pollution per hour than a modern diesel lorry, or 18 times more than a modern diesel car." 

"Even the most efficient wood-fuelled heating systems emit approximately 300 times more PM2.5 than gas boilers". 



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Posts

  • PosyPosy Posts: 3,601
    I have heard some pf these reports and feel it is a real concern. I love to see a real fire but I think it may be something we should deny ourselves for health reasons.
  • Nanny BeachNanny Beach Posts: 8,719
    I wanted a log burner, very muchI don't know about recent research I read 3 or 4 years ago, how polluting they were it's not new.  When we have been going out early evening to walk the dogs, the can smell the woodsmoke, see the larger particulates, (I wear a head torch), you are oboviously breathing that in, plus the more worrying and dangerous small particulates.  We bought a fake log burner, electric.We also no longer have bonfires, after reading of he carcinagenic effects
  • StephenSouthwestStephenSouthwest Posts: 635
    Yes it does concern me, and I have reduced our woodstove use as a result of recently learning about this.

    ...and I like the idea that wood burning can be a pretty closed carbon cycle, compared to gas. I like using the woodburners to heat from local dry wood from trees cut because they needed cutting, particularly if it's from my own garden, and I'm maintaining the same or increased amount of living wood in the garden. I was shocked to find just how possible it is to increase efficiency by how I use the stoves - I highly recommend reading 'The Log Book'. 

    It seriously worries me than local log suppliers are now importing logs from Poland!
  • B3B3 Posts: 27,505
    Lichen on the pavement all along out road apart from outside about three houses either side of our next door neighbour who likes a cosy open fire😒

    In London. Keen but lazy.
  • BenCottoBenCotto Posts: 4,718
    Good grief, I had no idea. There again, we do not have open fires or a wood burning stove so I do not feel I am especially susceptible and I see my county is quite low on the league table of polluted places. I have bonfires about once or twice a year so I do not believe I am risking personal health to any measurable degree by doing this but now know I am contributing to the general problem and must think again. The problem is if I drive to the tip with my branches will more particulates be emitted than if I had simply burned them?
    Rutland, England
  • FireFire Posts: 19,096
    @Nanny Beach - knowing about the pollution is not so new, but the close linking of PM2.5 from wood burning to dementias, Parkinsons, child development issues and COPD is quite new, I think.

  • FireFire Posts: 19,096
    BenCotto said:
    The problem is if I drive to the tip with my branches will more particulates be emitted than if I had simply burned them?
    I would say it very much depends what they do with the branches. At our particular tip, garden waste is chipped en masse. We don't have a landfill facility and general (non-recycled or composted or garden waste) is incinerated with high level gas capture. It's been spectacularly hard to get info from our of the tip management about the details of what happens to by products after that - lithium, cadmium, gases. It's very much worth getting to know ones local tip, its technology, its managers and its environmental goals. Too much happens behind the curtain. It's easy to just off load waste and any more thoughts about it. There needs to be ever more scrutiny, and pressure, as with water companies dumping waste into to rivers etc.

  • AstroAstro Posts: 433
    My dad used to burn stuff in the garden once or twice a year when I was a kid and I thought it was amazing. Always loved a fire and find it quite mesmerising.

    That being said over the last few years I have felt less inclined to have bonfires, I have felt that composting and chipping is more beneficial than burning. And have often wondered if the smoke was a pollutant.
  • ObelixxObelixx Posts: 30,090
    Bonfires are not allowed here, even in open countryside, but everyone round here has at least one a year to burn prunings that can't be otherwise used for chipping, kindling, firewood.   Everyone round here also has a log burner rather than an open fireplace.  In some of the older homes it's the main source of heat.

    We use ours infrequently - maybe a dozen times a year at the most since we moved here - and we have been burning our own kindling and logs now the ash trees we had felled have fried out.   When we first came we did buy chopped wood but just the odd bag.  We don't have a huge log pile in a special store like so many do here.

    We also have breezes blowing in clean air form the Atlantic just 20kms away.   I suspect particulate concentrations are more of a problem in more urban areas where people live closer together and there is the added pollution from traffic and industry to burden the air quality.    That said, lots of cattle, pigs and wildlife round here so I'm happy to reduce our log burning so as not to be endangering them.
    Vendée - 20kms from Atlantic coast.
    "The price good men (and women) pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men (and women)."
    Plato
  • LynLyn Posts: 23,190
    B3 said:
    Lichen on the pavement all along out road apart from outside about three houses either side of our next door neighbour who likes a cosy open fire😒

    I would never have believed that London had cleaned up so much as to have lichen on the pavement.  Wasn’t like that when I lived there.  

    Gardening on the wild, windy west side of Dartmoor. 

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