There is a wood burning stove on a road near my house that is in near constant use in winter, you can see visibile smoke from the chimney. It is in a clean air zone. I flagged it for enforcement as literally everyday my asthma was being triggered. It qualifies as an eco design and is exempt.
All EVs on that road? What's triggering your asthma is just that one wood burner in your neighbor's house? Wow! Powerful stuff
There are 3 of us just on this thread!
Yes my asthma is triggered by my neighbours’ wood burning! It isn’t unusual as you are implying! In winter because we live by a river the smoke settles in an inversion layer!
Given its not a main road and therefore cars spend relatively little time being driven on it, yes one wood burner can dominate the air pollution situation.
Most people are unaware of how polluting Ecodesign stoves are- look at the specification (PM – 40,000µg/m³) or NAEI data 2023. Approximately 817,000 Ecodesign stoves in the UK create 1.66ktonnes of PM2.5 compared to 1.16ktonnes for 35.69 million car exhausts. We had PM2.5 over 250µg/m³ in our home.
We have protections from road vehicles (25µg/m³ max at the side of a busy road) but nothing to stop extremely high levels of pollution from these stoves. We regularly have PM2.5 >100µg/m³ over a wide area from all the Ecodesign stoves in the area (worst place in UK for air pollution but low traffic)
And yes, family members have ended up in hospital from asthma attacks and a heart attack (separate incidents from different stoves). We were all struggling to breathe. Council say its not a statutory nuisance or prejudicial to health so refuse to take action. We will be forced out of our home.
I've never been to your area, so I can't judge the situation there. I grew up in a house with a wood burner as only source of heat, in my village at that time, almost every house was the same as mine. Nobody I knew suffered asthma
Well unfortunately many people do now. Most likely because air pollution is worse not helped by the increase in burning wood.
Asthma wasn't recognised as an illness until the 70s, and was significantly under diagnosed for a long time (and probably still is) - so forgive me but it's rather like insisting no one had autism on the 70s, no its not weird at all that Uncle Dave never married and had 3,000 model trains.
I'll rephrase it, nobody I knew then suffered from any respiratory condition.
*that you knew of
I grew up in a small village where everyone knew everyone else. Actually, there were people from the North of my region, which is more humid, who suffered those conditions that came to my village to spend their holiday to improve their health...
I didn't know of anyone with a respiratory condition either. Didn't mean we didn't have them, just misdiagnosed as, for example, a "chest infection" and given antibiotics.
Thing is you wouldn't know. The Harvard 6 cities study shows air pollution affects mortality. A Brown university study showed air pollution affects runners pace. For every 1 µg/m³ increase in PM2.5, Female runners slowed by 25 seconds Male runners by 32s pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39690352/
Exactly. I wasn’t diagnosed until a near fatal attack triggered by a neighbours bonfire. Only smoke affects my asthma. After the smoking ban I rarely needed my inhaler until ~5 years ago when everyone became obsessed with burning stuff! www.dsawsp.org/secondhand-s...
I was only diagnosed 8 years ago after returning from living in rural Spain where the air is cleaner.
1 wood burner is so much more polluting than 1 petrol/diesel car. 2.7 million open fires and stoves in the UK. Over 40 million vehicles. Look at the PM2.5 pollution which is one pollutant out of many. This is UK gov data from the NAEI for 2022.
To do anything about it would require brining a private nuisance action, with basically no guarantee of success and risk of significant costs.
Local authorities have a duty to protect us from anything that is a statutory nuisance or prejudicial to health, but they never do – just expect us to take action ourselves. Most don’t have enough faith in the British justice system to attempt this as the risk of a wood burning judge is too great.