The danger of wood burners in our homes
A Sheppard’s (Advertiser, Letters, March 31) comments suggest that s/he has fallen hook, line and sinker for the Stove Industry’s marketing guff.
Woodsmoke contains arsenic, formaldehyde, toluene, benzene and other known cancer-causing substances. It also contains a high level of particulate matter (PM2.5) – the most damaging form of air pollution to human health. It is linked to an increase risk of cancers, heart disease, respiratory illness and dementia. Who wants that being pumped into their neighbourhood? Air quality scientists would like to see a ban on all log burners in urban areas because of their impact on public health.
Neighbours are unable to control or prevent this kind of pollution exposure, since outdoor air quality affects indoor air quality. Smoke issued from a chimney doesn’t just get blown away – but can sink to ground level and still be detected many many hours after the stove has been extinguished – particularly in cold still conditions. This air pollution affects indoor air quality as it seeps in via natural leakage points in a home. I can smell our neighbours’ woodsmoke inside our home frequently.
Much is made of the cleaner stoves that are now available but it’s really important to note that even the newest Ecodesign stoves give off much more pollution than gas boilers or heat pumps. In fact, new research from the European Environmental Bureau has discovered that an Ecodesign stove is actually allowed to emit 750 times as much particulate matter as a truck from 2014! Ecodesign stoves are not the clean air miracle they are being sold as. Air pollution levels triple inside a home when a log burner is in use.
Wood burning may be a renewable form of energy but it is certainly not sustainable. Not in the time frame that we have to bring down emissions. When wood is burned, the CO2 that was absorbed over the years that the tree was alive is released back into the atmosphere all at once, along with short-lived pollutants such as black carbon. Trees can be replanted, but it takes decades[1] for those new trees to reabsorb the carbon that was emitted when their predecessors were burned. Burning wood is in fact very bad for the environment.
Wood burning is an inefficient form of home heating. Of course it is essential that everyone is warm and well in their own home, but the majority of log burners are used as a secondary form of heating for aesthetic purposes – not out of necessity.
Thank you to Councillor Parker for his insighfulness on this matter – I hope that other councillors and local authorities will be similarly astute and protect residents from wood smoke pollution.
Hazel Agombar
Egbert Road
References
- ^ it takes decades (protect-eu.mimecast.com)
- ^ Winchester (www.hampshirechronicle.co.uk)