SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 3, Insightful) by Frosty Piss on Saturday September 18 2021, @02:54PM (11 children)
When I lived out in the sticks, we always had a pile out back that was the designated “burn pile”. Fine, yes, it pollutes. But instead of regulating industry that produces many times the pollution, you’re going after rural land owners? Fuck you.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Saturday September 18 2021, @03:09PM (8 children)
The same reason why you'd better not make a single mistake in your tax return form on pain of being audited and fined, while rich people with connections and lobbying power enjoy their billions under the sun and "reach an agreement" with the IRS every once in a while in the worst case scenario. You as a peon never get to negociate with the taxman: you pay first and ask questions later.
The state always goes after the peons because the peons have no clout and they're an easy target.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mcgrew on Saturday September 18 2021, @03:14PM (6 children)
Especially since this pollution doesn't add to climate change, because the fire's fuel was made from atmospheric CO2 within the last century, unlike burning fossils. It's only a problem for those with COPD or other such health problems which were probably caused by deliberately inhaling tobacco smoke and using bleach far too often.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday September 18 2021, @03:17PM
Odd, someone needs to check the code. I was replying to Frosty Piss, Rosco's comment wasn't there when I hit Submit.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 18 2021, @03:31PM (2 children)
So... "new" CO2 is fine, while "old" CO2 is bad? The CO2 in all fossil fuels comes from atmospheric CO2.
(Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Saturday September 18 2021, @03:50PM (1 child)
Yes, that's pretty much the gist of it.
The planet's carbon store is compose of a majority of stuff locked in rocks and oil, another large part locked in trees and plants, and a tiny bit floating around in the atmosphere. You want to keep most of the carbon locked in solid materials - living or dead.
The thing is, if you release carbon from living matter, it eventually gets locked again in other living matter within a few years to a few decades (provided you don't log faster than you replant of course). If you release carbon from dead matter, it takes millions of years to get locked again in new dead matter.
So not burning anything is best, burning live plants is not great in the short term but okay in the long run, while burning fossil fuels is only okay over geological timescales.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 19 2021, @04:21AM
It doesn't take millions of years. 0.01% of all the carbon in the biosphere is locked away in limestone each year by shellfish. If it wasn't for volcanoes and oil seeps, all the carbon would be gone in 10,000 years.
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Saturday September 18 2021, @06:07PM (1 child)
I recently had a round with somebody on Twitter about this, who raised the separate issue that aside from the local pollutants from wood stoves and other home burning, there's methane. Initially I didn't think there was any methane, but it turns out there is. I think I was mistaken on this point because when discussing wood stove emissions everybody focuses on pm 2.5. Turns out that's a proxy for un-burned hydrocarbons which include CH4.
The reason I'm not feeling guilty is that my opponent in the debate hit me with "home burning is 45% of all CH4 from stationary sources in the US", and if you're a careful reader you might guess, as I did, that "stationary sources" is a small fraction of anthropogenic CH4 and most likely encompasses things that are far more dirty than wood stoves such as open burning.
In any event, fire has been a part of the forest here in NorCal since way before Europeans and to cycle back to the other point, they're happy to come after my wood stove while failing to approve fuel removal that might keep wild fires from getting to be the size of Rhode Island. That's no exaggeration. The Dixie Fire, currently burning, is about 960k acres putting it just short of the land+water area of RI. It already exceeded the land area of RI several weeks ago.
The AQI from these wildfires is atrocious, but they want to come after the wood stoves? It really does seem less about the environment and more about making it so people have to rely on the system.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 18 2021, @06:21PM
Possibly but I would hazard it's more along the lines of "somebody dooooo something"!111
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by mcgrew on Saturday September 18 2021, @03:20PM
That's what you get for voting single party. Wisdom says hiring a bartender because of his political party is stupid, and hiring a legislator for the party s/he belongs to is far more stupid.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 18 2021, @10:25PM
Rural burnoffs of old trees and bits around the farms are a regular feature in Clean Green New Zealand. Please don't let our rabid left-wing anti-farmer idiots see this. They have been making life almost untenable for farmers the past few years. It really looks like the govt agenda is to kill off food production and make us dependent on food imports.
(Score: 2) by corey on Sunday September 19 2021, @12:16AM
Yeah, we’re similar. 13 acres, half Aussie eucalyptus bush. We have 5 separate bonfire spots to get rid of all the leaves from the fallen trees. Trunks become next year’s firewood. We’d have a compost heap the size of a semi trailer if we composted it all (plus the extra work). In spring (now), we’ve been burning lots of the fallen trees and bark on the ground to reduce fuel load for the incoming summer (aka bushfire season).
We do compost a fair bit of stuff but out here landowners all burn off, but nobody bats an eyelid.