Polluting wood burners face curbs

In today’s Saturday Telegraph Your unmissable weekend package

Steven Swinford

Victoria Ward

COSY winter gatherings around a roaring fire are threatened by a government investigation into whether the popularity of wood-burning stoves and log fires is damaging people’s health.

Michael Gove, the Environment Secretary, is to begin a consultation in the new year to examine pollutants caused by wet wood and smoky coal.

Its findings will feed into the Government’s clean air strategy, which will be published next autumn.

A source told The Daily Telegraph that the consultation will be “very open” and rather than recommending specific policies will invite submissions about the problem. But it is feared that if the department does back calls for tighter restrictions it will have a huge knock-on effect on families who have spent hundreds of pounds on the fashionable stoves.

Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, has suggested that people could be banned from using wood-burning stoves in highly polluted areas for part of the year.

He said cracking down on the use of such stoves was crucial as road vehicles were responsible for only 50 per cent of pollution in London.

He has urged the Government to establish new a “Clean Air Act” to cut non-vehicle sources of pollution such as burning wood in homes, as well as shipping and building sites.

There are about 1.5million stoves in the UK and 200,000 are sold annually, with the appliances often marketed as a green form of home heating.

However, there has been growing concern over their environmental impact. Researchers at King’s College London have found that wood-burning in the capital accounts for up to 31 per cent of the city’s particulate pollution.

The tiny particles, known as PM2.5, are the most harmful type of air pollution and exacerbate lung and heart conditions because the particles pass into the lungs and bloodstream. A 2016 Government survey found that 7.5 per cent of homes burned wood, comprising 30 per cent of particle emissions – far more than the amount from diesel cars.

It estimated wood burning was responsible for as much as 25 per cent of London’s pollution.

Mr Khan has said that part of the problem was people burning wet wood – and failing to keep stoves properly maintained. Wet wood makes a fire burn at a lower temperature, meaning less fuel is fully burnt and more escapes as soot.

Environmental interest groups are said to be planning to use the consultation to lobby for a prohibition on the smokiest type of coal, after a similar ban was announced by the Irish government this month.

The Government has already introduced a certification scheme to identify and promote dried wood to consumers to try to reduce the amount of wet wood burnt in stoves.

Ministers are unlikely to introduce an outright ban because they are wary about been seen as “killjoys” who criminalise people who heat their homes with fuel from a log pile or coal bunker, it is believed.

But they might crack down on the types of fuel that can be burnt, although such regulations would be hard to enforce.