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from the there's-no-smoke-without-bonfire dept.
Pollutionwatch: how bad are bonfires for the environment?:
A team of French scientists has been investigating air pollution from bonfires. They used a specifically constructed fire chamber: a big room that could easily accommodate one or two whole houses, added instrumentation in the extract ducts, spread a bed of sand on the floor and set about burning leaves and hedge trimmings.
Bonfires are a frequent source of complaints to UK local councils, and in some places these complaints quadrupled during the 2020 lockdown. But little is known about the air pollution they cause. This means they are often assumed to produce pollution that is similar to home fires and wood stoves.
Any gardener (and their neighbours) will know the smell of smoke from burning green waste. Unsurprisingly, for each kilogram burned, garden waste on bonfires produced up to 30 times more particle pollution (smoke) than burning logs in a stove, but smoke from the wood stove contained up to 12 times more cancer-causing polyaromatic hydrocarbons. The pollution from bonfires more closely resembled wildfire smoke, which is being increasingly linked to health problems.
Autumn is coming and so is the annual garden-tidy before winter. The simple message is: do not burn your garden waste; compost it instead or shred it to make a mulch.
Journal Reference:
Camille Noblet, Jean-Luc Besombes, Marie Lemireb, et al. Emission factors and chemical characterization of particulate emissions from garden green waste burning Science of The Total Environment (DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.149367)
(Score: 4, Interesting) by looorg on Saturday September 18 2021, @12:39PM (2 children)
Time and space. Burning something literally makes most of it go up in smoke. The problem is gone, not counting then pollution. If you have to compost or take it to some other facility takes time, effort and space. People are lazy, even people that like to do gardening stuff or just have a garden.
People are probably mostly complaining cause of the smell and the smoke not to fulfill some green fantasies. They are complaining cause other people and their actions are being an inconvenience to them and what they want to do. You want to sit in your garden and your neighbor wants to burn his his leaves and twigs at the same time. Or you want to be in your garden and the neighbor is having a raging BBQ with music next door until the late hours. etc etc. It really doesn't have, almost, anything to do with any environmental fantasies.
From some personal observation I would say the big complaint with burning garden waste is that people are burning things that contain a lot of moisture. This makes it smell like ass and is a lot less efficient then burning things that have dried. This is why you should or normally do burn dried wood etc. You don't burn wet wood (leaves, twigs, dead flowers etc), as it will smell and smoke a lot more and well it's also harder to actually get the fire started. Just chalk it down to the usual explanation of people being idiots.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday September 18 2021, @04:45PM (1 child)
You forget a big potential problem with burning garden and yard trimmings: the fire might get out of hand, and burn down your house. Or your neighbor's house.
When I was a kid and we lived in the country, my father burned our trash in the back yard. I guess it was a traditional means of disposal, and they must have burned the trash on my grandparents' farm. Had this metal can with perforations, meant for this purpose. The idea wasn't much good. The can would rust like crazy, and be falling apart after just 3 uses, and he'd go buy another. I suspect one problem was that society was using more plastic. Lots of plastic in the trash makes it burn hotter, and the can couldn't take that. Not to mention all the lovely toxic fumes burning plastic gives off.
More than once, burning embers started a grass fire. He had Mom standing by with the garden hose. When the grass caught, she'd hose it and and he'd beat at it with a snow shovel. The grass fires never got far, they were on it right away, but the fires could have. Especially tiresome was to have to spend the next half an hour spraying water on the grass and trash ashes to make sure it couldn't start another fire. After several such episodes, he gave up on the whole idea as too dangerous, as well as impractical, and from then on, he took the trash to the city dump, which was only a mile from his job.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday September 20 2021, @03:12PM
It's useful to have a burn barrel. It's not convenient to use it as your main means of garbage disposal. In the event that you are going to do that, you need an incinerator. Not a random burn barrel.
This is what I was thinking of, but apparently concrete is out of style? I went looking for incinerators and saw all manner of metal contraptions, including the burn barrel.
https://drloihjournal.blogspot.com/2016/11/waste-disposal-history-of-chicago.html [blogspot.com]
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"