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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: 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.
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(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