No burn days?

[Luvlylilac]

I just have a feeling that way back in the day before any cars and power plants and leaf blowers and stuff like that the air was much, much cleaner. Yet everyone would have fires in their homes as it was pretty much the main or only source of heat. Now all the sudden people act like that is such a huge contributor to bad air quality. I tend to think not so much and it's for the most part caused by other things. That's just my opinion at least. Fires are just the easiest thing they can try to control and take
Away. I just don't believe that it's this awful cause of pollution. Plus I still feel like its an infringement on someone's rights. Plus I love the smell of wood burning! Lol. Its just so cozy and some people also may truly need it for warmth as well.

[camanchaca]

Originally Posted by Luvlylilac

I just have a feeling that way back in the day before any cars and power plants and leaf blowers and stuff like that the air was much, much cleaner. Yet everyone would have fires in their homes as it was pretty much the main or only source of heat. Now all the sudden people act like that is such a huge contributor to bad air quality. I tend to think not so much and it's for the most part caused by other things. That's just my opinion at least. Fires are just the easiest thing they can try to control and take
Away. I just don't believe that it's this awful cause of pollution. Plus I still feel like its an infringement on someone's rights. Plus I love the smell of wood burning! Lol. Its just so cozy and some people also may truly need it for warmth as well.

They did lots of things in the past that everybody at the time reckoned were just fine, and then whoops-a-doodle turns out smoking's not good for you after all, and doctors need to wash their hands, and maybe you shouldn't be putting that lead into all that paint and gasoline.

[Northern Maine Land Man]

Tanneries used to dump their vats directly into the adjacent rivers. Pulp mill digesters used to just blow their gasses directly into the atmosphere. You would know what color the paper mill was running by the color of the stream below the mill. Then we began to learn better ways. Many of those chemicals could be recovered and reused to save money. The rivers got cleaner too. It is a fact that water coming from most paper mills today is cleaner than the water taken in by the mill. Many completely natural streams in Maine have a tea color which is tannic acid leaching out of natural forests. Is that a pollutant? If a manufacturer puts it in a stream it's a pollutant. If it exists naturally it's natural.

[arctichomesteader]

The wildfires out west make all the woodstoves just a drop in a bucket.

[Luvlylilac]

camanchaca I'm hard pressed to believe me lighting a fire in my fireplace is as bad as a dr not washing his hands between patients. Yes we are wiser now than in the past on some things but worse about others in my opinion. And I still don't believe fireplace fires are a huge contributor to the air pollution we have now. Not saying they purify the air or anything but don't believe they are even close to as bad for the air as many other things.

[Luvlylilac]

Arctichomesteader good point lol

[Luvlylilac]

Some good points as well northern maine land man

[Luvlylilac]

Just to be clear where I live the restrictions are so bad sometimes it's 3,4,even 5 weeks straight of no burn days. Not just once in awhile. They want you to register your fireplace, and may fine you if you burn on a no burn day. If it was just no burn days here and there I wouldn't have as much of a problem with it. They have gone to the extreme though and act as if the citizens not lighting a fire is the main path to cleaner air. Or at least the path that is easiest for them to try to enforce.

[camanchaca]

Originally Posted by Luvlylilac

camanchaca I'm hard pressed to believe me lighting a fire in my fireplace is as bad as a dr not washing his hands between patients. Yes we are wiser now than in the past on some things but worse about others in my opinion. And I still don't believe fireplace fires are a huge contributor to the air pollution we have now. Not saying they purify the air or anything but don't believe they are even close to as bad for the air as many other things.

On the other hand, the scientific evidence. Here's what looks like a good review article: http://www.uvm.edu/~susagctr/Documents/Woodsmoke.pdf household burning starts on page 82, and has a bunch of links to specific studies finding that significant portions of the particulate matter in urban areas is due to household wood burning. Figure 5 is relevant, as are quotes like:

For 58 case-control pairs, the odds ratio (OR) for a serious acute lower respiratory infection (ALRI: bronchiolitis or pneumonia) asso- ciated with the presence of a wood stove was 4.2 ( p < .0012).

A companion study evaluated the impact of particulate mat- ter on emergency room visits for asthma in Seattle (Schwartz et al., 1993). A significant association was observed between PM10 particle levels and emergency room visits for asthma. The mean PM10 level during the 1-yr study period was 30 μg/m3. At this concentration, PM10 appeared to be responsible for 125 of the asthma emergency room visits. An exposure response re- lationship was also observed down to very low levels of PM10, with no evidence for a threshold at concentrations as low as 15 μg/m3. The authors indicate that on an annual basis 60% of the fine particle mass in Seattle residential neighborhoods is from woodburning.
Overall, health effects research in Seattle shows associa- tions between PM2.5 and lung function decrements in children (Koenig et al., 1993), visits to emergency departments for asthma (Norris et al., 1999), hospitalizations for asthma (Sheppard et al., 1999), and increases in asthma symptoms in children (Yu et al., 2000), as well as increases in exhaled nitric oxide (Koenig et al., 2003, 2005). Since woodburning is the primary source of fine particles in the Seattle airshed, the health effects studies suggest a causal relationship.

Note that this second quote is talking only about particulate matter, and not any of the carcinogens or other byproducts of wood burning, see pp 69-70 for a table of those.

[beltrams]

There is a HUGE variation in the amount of wood smoke and particulate matter put in the air by individuals burning wood depending on the type of appliance used (open fireplace, old wood stove, new generation wood stove, gasification boiler, outdoor boiler, masonry heater) the dryness of the wood, and how it's operated. I've seen some chimneys that seem to put out more smoke than several dozen other cleaner burning devices such as newer wood stoves or masonry heaters combined.

All it takes is one old stove, choked way back, maybe burning so-so wood to fill a valley, (often village or town) area with a haze on a windless, still, grey-sky day to get the anti-wood burners citing their particulate matter studies.

Me? I heat with wood, burned in a masonry heater. When I was learning to use it I actually used to run outside and check out what was coming out of the chimney. It puts no visible smoke out after the first 10 minutes or so of the fire and even then I've learned to cut way back on the starting smoke by going light on the newspaper and a few other tricks such as keeping the wood and kindling away from the firebox side walls.

I also have a 1926 Glenwood C cook stove waiting patiently for me to hook it up to the kitchen chimney that I have yet to install. I suspect that operator behavior will have a lot to say about how much smoke that one produces.

Camanchaca, I'm sympathetic to your cause to a point, but while I know all combustion appliances put out some measure of PM, I think you can admit that some folks' chimneys account for the vast percentage of the pollution, relative to other chimneys.

Let's not forget that oil and natural gas produce significant, if not sometimes truly huge amounts of pollution as well, as anybody that has ever been to oil producing areas (ground water pollution, smoky natural gas flares, oil spills, etc.) can attest to. It's just that that oil and gas production pollution affects mainly rural, poor people such as those living in rural Africa, Louisiana, many other Gulf Coast locations, Appalachia, and so on, rather than the beautiful people in the cities and towns and as some have noticed, rural folks' lives aren't valued as highly as metro area folk often times. Wood smoke pollution is more honest I think as it is produced closer to those actually burning the wood rather than dumping the pollution on say, the Niger River delta as is the case for things like oil.

Oil pollution example
Some current oil and gas water pollution stories from just the past few days.
And don't even get me started on current Fukushima pollution and childhood thyroid illness posts.

But as I say, if the pollution is on other people, especially people far away, it's not seen as bad by some.