Interesting news on the ‘airborne particulates’ front, which I’ve blogged about here before in historical context.

Cars and their supposedly ‘eco-friendly’ diesel fuel (unleashed by Gordon Brown, under Labour in 2002) are not the only culprit, we now find. New research shows that a key culprit in the UK is now, ironically, the trendy wood-stoves of eco-worriers…

“domestic burning is the single largest contributor to the UK’s harmful particulate matter emissions. PM2.5 emissions from domestic burning accounted for 43% of total PM2.5 emissions in 2019.”

Who knew? But they pump out nearly half of the UK’s tiny PM2.5 airborne particulates, which are the ones said to have the worst impacts on human health. These days “domestic burning” overwhelmingly means wood-fired stoves and heating, with lesser seasonal contributions by garden bonfires (mostly in the early autumn), and barbeques (mostly in high summer). Eurostat estimate such trendy stoves cause some £14 billion a year in health-related problems in the UK and EU, albeit basing their figures on a 2013 WHO estimate.

The newer UK research was done in 2019, so the particle percentages were not skewed by the reduction in car travel during the lockdown. And so few people now have coal delivered for home fires, and most of those use clean coke, that one can’t sensibly blame coal either.

The news comes along with the banning of sales of “wet wood” (from 1st May 2021, it’s reported). You’ll no longer get wet bags from any-old-where, and will have to get supplies properly pre-dried from a wood fuel merchant. That’s could be a bit hard on the owners of small woods, as they’re presumably now denied the immediate public sale of the thinnings and fellings, other than to a registered wood dealer. But I guess that may already have been the way of doing such things.

Also to be banned from being installed in homes are the smokiest types of home wood-stove, though only from 2022. Presumably that’s to allow dealers time to sell off their old stock. Beware of what you’re buying then, as you could find that the use of the old type will also banned sometime in the 2030s — when you’ve only had a few years of use from it.

Presumably canal-boaters will still be allowed to burn dropped wood that they’ve dried, after being found free in the hedgerows etc.

Update: Country Life reports a backstep by the government. Council Inspectors will now not actually be ripping out the older stoves from your home, come 1st January 2022. The Stove Industry Alliance, who presumably know about such things, tells the magazine that… “there will be no requirement to remove” existing open fireplaces and older stoves.