wood burning

If you burn a shovel full of coal on a multi-fuel burner you’ll get a sense of why this is a relative, albeit still very serious issue:

The air pollution from wood burning in homes is responsible for more than £1bn a year in health-related damages in the UK and €10bn (£8.5bn) across the EU, according to a report.

The analysis from the European Public Health Alliance found the total costs of early deaths, illness and lost work resulting from outdoor air pollution produced by all home heating was €29bn a year.

Wood burning was the biggest single cause of these costs, accounting for 54% of the total in the UK and 40% in the EU. This is despite wood stoves producing only 11% of heat in UK homes and 14% in the EU. The report combines burning wood in stoves and on open fires: in the UK two-thirds of people use stoves.

The researchers said their cost estimates were conservative because lack of data prevented them from including the impact of indoor air pollution from heating.

Compared with transport, regulators have largely neglected heating and cooking as sources of air pollution, the EPHA said. The report found that heat pumps and solar water heaters produced no air pollution at homes using them.

“It is clearer than ever that burning biomass and fossil fuels at home is not only an environmental problem, but also a major health problem,” said Milka Sokolović, the EPHA director general. “The solution, obviously, lies in ensuring that homes are powered by clean renewables. As people are grappling with high energy prices, we must avoid quick and dirty solutions.”

Air pollution is the single biggest environmental risk to health, causing millions of early deaths a year globally. In the EU, just one of pollutants, small particles under 2.5 microns in size (PM2.5), is blamed for 300,000 deaths a year. A comprehensive global review in 2019 found that air pollution may be damaging every organ in the human body.