HIGHLIGHTING DANGER OF WOODBURNERS

[GlassHouseBlue]

Fine particulate matter (PM2.5) -
essentially tiny particles of soot - is one
of the most dangerous air pollutants.
Breathing it in is linked to lung cancer,
heart damage, strokes, impaired cognition
and mental health problems, and can
exacerbate conditions such as asthma,
COPD and pulmonary fibrosis. Children
and elderly people are most vulnerable

What is your suggestion to people who have a wood burner as their primary source of heat? Is someone going to pay for them to have an alternative?

@Parker231 electric.

Not everyone can afford to change- electricity bills can be astronomical.

The OP raises a valid issue. I certainly wouldn't want one around kids either.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/06/indoor-wood-burning-raises-women-lung-cancer-risk-study

But people will carry on ignoring it just as some smokers do.

yes this, absolutely !

Probably none of that infant mortality was due to woodburners.

Modern stoves must meet a certain level of whatever it is to reduce this. The worst time is lighting the stove or opening it to add fuel. But some are very efficient now. Open fires are bad though.

Can't afford electric.

It is a long time since Iworked in the sector but I recall that modern wood pellets are made from waste wood feom sawmills thatwould otherwise just be incinerated. Public wood-fired heating can also recycle heat eg for public swimming pools.

aqicn.org/scale/ aqicn.org/scale/]]]]

This is where ds found the information.

ouside of rural living woodburners installation in urban homes is mainly a middle class thing. Because it’s “cosy” and looks nice.

people who can’t afford heat aren’t going to pay £££££ upfront to install log burners, they’ll just not use their gas/electric heating.

YABU

My stove is very cosy.

Fire has also been used to heat my 300 year old listed building (right out in the middle of nowhere) since it was built.

My aga and stove keep my downstairs cozy, so my gas bolier does not need to be heating 22 radiators in my house which costs a fortune.
We are self sufficient with wood so it doesnt cost us to use it.

It's on now and we love it, and keeps the downstairs much warmer and cosier than the radiators.

Heating options says as ground source or air source heat pumps are simply not an option for heating buildings like mine.... solid stone, (No cavity walls or similar to insulate) built on the ground, and due to being listed not allowed to have efficient doors / windows either. Last night it was -5 and it hasn't got above freezing here today.... the house roof and garden are still covered in Mondays snow, and more is settling right now.

So yes you are being unreasonable to have any opinion on the heat source for my house. Its quite simply none of your buisness!!!

(and yes my central heating and radiators has been coming on during the day today when my upstairs dropped below 13 (in the day) and 14 (during the night).)

There is definitely a place for both approaches, I agree. I'm fairly certain that anyone lobbying their MP would have mentioned it though.

Also, I would humbly submit that the way to influence people is to educate, inform and have reasoned, balanced debate. This is not the way the OP started the thread.

I would also humbly submit that air quality is not being wrecked by log burners. Impacted, probably, but it certainly isn't undoing the impact of cleaner car emissions which impact the environment way more than log burners do.

I am curious about the carbon emissions statement as burning logs only releases the carbon absorbed by the tree which would happen as it decays anyway, albeit at a slower rate. Burning fossil fuels releases carbon that didn't previously exist, so from a carbon release perspective, log burners are relatively clean.

Interesting site. The readings for my village (with a fair few woodburners and open fires) were:
12th national percentile (where 100% is high pollution, 0% is low pollution),
PM2.5: 6.20 (limit 5)
PM10: 12.47 (limit 15)
NO2: 12.81 (limit 10)

Not quite within all of the limits, but not dramatically exceeding them.

For comparison, I grew up in a 1990s suburb where few houses had fireplaces (and none used them regularly). It wasn't far from a motorway. The readings there:
64th national percentile,
PM2.5: 10.65
PM10: 17.29
NO2: 18.85

On the basis of this (and other locations I've looked at, some of which were within a Clean Air Zone) I shall continue to remain more concerned about the effect of road traffic than woodburners in my village. Vehicle exhausts create pollution, tyres shed microplastics, and no woodburner ever ran a kid down in the street. It also wasn't a woodburner who failed to stop at a zebra crossing when I was waiting to cross on my way back from the Co-Op just now.

Ive just had a look at that and conclude its a load of rubbish.

My house is a house barn conversion.
It was 1 address but we have converted some of our barn to a self contained annex and we have 2 postal addressed for our 1 building.
The upstairs of our home is over the annexe.

The air pollution values of these 2 addresses are 19 apart.... the main house is apparently 41, while the annexe which is part of the house is 60???.... and then our next door neighbour (the farm house) has a value of 34!!!!!!!!!

For context we live in the middle of no where high on a hill in Yorkshire. We have very little light or noise pollution. We are a 30 min drive to a motorway and have no rail network near by either! I can't imagine that many people could have cleaner air than we have in the middle of the country side surrounded by working farms.

And its simply not possible that these 2 "addresses" (which are exactly the same building, (and address 2 didnt even exist until recently) can have such a different air pollution level!!!!!

Oh, I absolutely agree that road traffic is a huge problem in terms of pollutants. Massive. And anywhere within hearing distance of a motorway is going to have poor air quality. I just found it interesting in that where I live we are in the 5th national percentile, so about as clean as it gets for the UK, but the only limit being exceeded is the PM2.5 one.

Except....the nasty sciencey stuff again suggests that wood smoke really isn't doing any favours for child and infant health :

• •
• PM2.5 exposure from wood smoke impairs fetal growth and placental function.
• •
• PM2.5 exposure alters placental angiogenesis and gene expression (VEGF-A, HIF-1α).
• •
• PM2.5 from wood smoke reduces placental oxygen diffusion to fetus.
• •
• Wood smoke exposure pre- and during pregnancy impacts maternal and fetal health.

Exposure to fine particulate matter 2.5 from wood combustion smoke causes vascular changes in placenta and reduce fetal size - ScienceDirect

If you're not interested in foetuses, here's one about the effect on children, specifically from wood burning stoves.

But it's not clear they're actually dying from this, so it's probably fine just to ignore it - burn, baby, burn!

Wood stove interventions and child respiratory infections in rural communities: KidsAir Rationale and Methods - PMC

"Acute lower respiratory tract infections (LRTIs) account for more than 27% of all hospitalizations among US children under five years of age. Residential burning of biomass for heat leads to elevated indoor levels of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) that often exceed current health based air quality standards. This is concerning as PM2.5 exposure is associated with many adverse health outcomes, including a greater than three-fold increased risk of LRTIs. Evidence-based efforts are warranted in rural and American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) communities in the US that suffer from elevated rates of childhood LRTI and commonly use wood for residential heating."

Increase in wood burners offsets cuts in pollution from cars – official data | The Independent

I would also humbly submit that air quality is not being wrecked by log burners. Impacted, probably, but it certainly isn't undoing the impact of cleaner car emissions which impact the environment way more than log burners do.

Log burners are literally undoing the work done by cleaning up car emissions. See the above report.

I am curious about the carbon emissions statement as burning logs only releases the carbon absorbed by the tree which would happen as it decays anyway, albeit at a slower rate. Burning fossil fuels releases carbon that didn't previously exist, so from a carbon release perspective, log burners are relatively clean.

This is a poor argument, because given the urgency of the climate thing, we need to be cutting carbon emissions now, not offsetting them slowly over decades and decades as replacement trees slowly regrow. But a much more worrying problem is that of black carbon, which as I explained before turbocharges global warming by soaking up heat radiation. Biomass fuel burning, globally, contributes more to climate change than flying.

People saying "I live in a 2,000 year old farmhouse on top of Mam Tor" are being disingenous. I don't think anyone on here is arguing that log burners are not justifiable for a small % of people. Most houses, however, are either on gas or can have heat pumps fitted. They are increasingly being fitted on old buildings as well. There will always be some buildings where only biomass burning really works, but these will increasingly be a small minority.

And the existance of these buildings is not a reason for lying about the health consequences, because people need to know about this kind of stuff so that they can make informed decisions about whether to live in a really old building or not. A friend of mine is about to move from her listed building and buy another property because her child has asthma and it seems like open fireplaces are the only real way to heat her old listed house, which has high ceilings, non cavity walls,and is prone to damp, so heat pumps will probably never work and gas central heating is never enough either.

Don't quote risk by percentage without providing your baseline figure - very sloppy.

If you are going to quote this figure, please provide the baseline figures for non smokers in the general population, by age.

If you can't do this, you shouldn't be spouting on about lung cancer risk.

(she says she would not have bought the bloody house in the first place if she had known about this, and she is worried that the time spent living there may have further aggravated her child's lung condition. People need to know, so that they can, at least, choose to avoid buying these properties if they have worries about the health risks)

Here you go:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412023004014?via%3Dihub

Not having studied either maths or science beyond GCSE I’m having to rely on the Guardian to “translate” the statistics:

“In the UK, one in 13 men and one in 15 women born after 1960 are expected to be diagnosed with lung cancer during their lifetimes. In the US it is one in 16 men and one in 17 women. The US study found that more frequent use of indoor wood heating led to greater risk. For example, people who used their wood burner on more than 30 days a year had a 68% increased lung cancer risk compared with people who did not burn wood”

So the baseline appears to be 6 or 7% in the UK. Not huge but still not great starting odds.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/06/indoor-wood-burning-raises-women-lung-cancer-risk-study

A (n over)simplified example: I think that means for the UK:

If we have two groups of 100 people, one group regularly uses a wood burner and the other doesn’t (and all other variables the same between the two groups):

• in the non-wood burning group 6 or 7 of those people would be diagnosed with lung cancer
• in the wood burning group 4-5 more - so 10-11 people in total - would be diagnosed with lung cancer.

Yeah, I’m not finding those odds very attractive.

Those Nitrogen Dioxide figures are insane. The ULEZ doesn't go far enough, it should be a ZEZ.

I don’t buy that any of this impacts infant mortality or we wouldn’t exist. We have been keeping warm in this way for thousands of years.
Sitting around a fire is as old as the hills literally.

Most likely is the child/children sadly had more serious underlying health issues. It is disingenuous to say otherwise.if you have severe lung issues and have the option - living rurally and having access to great healthcare will do far more than trying to enforce draconian laws.

I can’t help but feel it’s another excuse to cover up poor healthcare. The culture of blame and woke lecturing will always have a chilling effect on people.

I imagine soon enough someone will design smoke less ‘wood’ that will solve the issue anyway. The answer isn’t sitting in the cold, but one of enterprise and invention.

There is literally evidence upthread that it is a massive killer in the developing world

@Artistbythewater please do read the evidence. These are independent bodies. It's clear what air pollution does.