Global Action Plan recently held a Forest Fuels webinar on the health and environmental impacts of industrial and domestic woodburning.
Experts spoke about how damaging woodburning is to our health, how it is destroying wildlife habitats and ecosystems, accelerating climate change and causing the air we breathe to be toxic. Whether used at an industrial level by power stations to provide energy or as an energy source for manufacturing industries or at a domestic level in woodburning stoves and fireplaces in our homes, using wood as a fuel is unsustainable, polluting, inefficient and significantly contributing to greenhouse gas emissions.
Below are some of the facts from the webinar.
️️🔥 Between 2018-2019 UK households burnt at least 2.41 million tonnes of woodfuel according to a Defra report in 2020.
️🔥 UK woodlands cannot sustain this increased demand by households for woodfuel so more wood is being imported each year taken from ancient forests in Eastern Europe.
️🔥 Over twice as many people who burn indoors are in urban areas and have another source of heating compared to rural areas.
️🔥 Only 8% of households using wood as fuel do so out of necessity.
️🔥 Due to the inefficiency of wood as a fuel, more of it needs to be burnt per unit of energy than oil, gas or coal resulting in higher CO2 emissions.
️🔥 Domestic woodburning now emits more pollution than all the power stations in the UK.
️🔥 CO2 emitted by wood through burning in a very short period of time will take decades to be reabsorbed by newly planted trees.
According to Trade Industry Bodies, there are 1.5 million woodburning stoves in use in the UK and in the first half of 2023 the Stove Industry Association reported that 86,300 new stoves were bought. This rising trend year on year means that millions more tonnes of wood are now being burnt by households in the UK making it easy to see how pollution from this source is now exceeding pollution from all power stations in the UK despite a relatively small proportion of households across the UK using them. Any gains in air quality made by a reduction in the use of cars and a move to greener forms or transport is being lost because of the rise in this polluting and largely unnecessary type of heating.
See here to watch the full webinar on youtube. Skip to 37 minutes in to hear the facts about domestic woodburning.
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