Happy Winter’s Solstice! We thought this would be a perfect time to look at home heating and, more particularly, burning wood. As we covered before, a new campaign is about to launch culminating in Clean Air Night on 24 January. This highlights how burning wood at home harms your wallet, your health and the planet. Key facts on each of these: it’s almost always more expensive that other forms of heating; it’s the largest source of particulate matter in the UK; and it releases more CO2 than burning fossil fuels.
Dousing the flames
We don’t want to be holier than thou here. Perhaps we’d have bought a wood-burning stove at some point. Perhaps we’d be keen to stress that any we’d bought was eco-friendly (in fact houses with these installed are still three times more polluted than those without). Actually, our version of a cosy Christmas fire is below - an unused set of slightly naff fairy lights. We like them!
This isn’t just a decision for individual families. It impacts neighbourhoods and communities too. As this article discusses, solid fuel burning leads to 284 premature deaths in London alone, 90 new cases of asthma in children, 60 new cases of stroke and 30 new lung cancers. This translates to a cost to healthcare of £800 a year by everyone who choses to burn wood. We found this quite shocking. We can’t be sure but we suspect the significantly increased readings for PM2.5 at our local node on a Saturday night could be related to wood burning in nearby homes.
Changing our spots
This got us thinking about behaviour change. We all do things that are bad for our health and some things negatively affect others too. Even with perfect information, we might not find it in us to change, or we might try something different then revert to our old ways. Some key insights into behaviour change might be particularly pertinent here.
For example, social proof - rather than wood burners being a must have “keeping up with the Joneses” item, how can they be seen as the opposite? Making something a positive choice - ditching an item you’ve just spent £100s on (even though economists will remind us it’s a sunk cost) feels wasteful in all senses: can they be repurposed to something beautiful? Finally, reduce or eliminate? - some argue environmentalists shouldn’t focus on creating more vegans but instead encourage everyone to reduce their meat intake: should wood burning be considered a once a year, special activity?
The needle and the damage done
Finally, during this festive season, please don’t be tempted to burn Christmas trees after their useful life. As well as the impacts we’d already mentioned, they release toxic creosote. Assuming yours doesn’t have roots, the most environmental way to dispose of them is to get them chopped up for wood chippings - most councils will organise this. Christmas trees that go to landfill produce large amounts of methane - a greenhouse gas and a precursor to ozone pollution.
In our house, we’ll be dragging our perennial sparkly twigs back to their storage place come January! We know you’ll all want a picture… Meanwhile Happy Christmas!