Throw another log on? Not so fast!

We haven’t had much of a spring quite yet. Lots of days when the temps have stayed in the 40’s. Damned few of those glorious early spring days when the temps are in 60’s or even – how loverly – the 70’s.

So a lot of my neighbors are still using their fireplaces.

I like the smell of smoke. I like the feeling of toasty toes when I get up close and personal with a fireplace-fire. I like the occasional occasions when one of those neighbors invites me in to enjoy a glass of wine by a big roaring fire.

But my own fireplace?

Well…

I have a perfectly nice fireplace in my living room. And during the 27 years I’ve lived here, I’ve had exactly one fire in that lovely fireplace. A Duraflame log, maybe 25 years ago. And that was that.

Too much of a hassle. Too much concern about a cinder hopping out and singeing the carpet. Or my toasting toes. Too much clean up after. Too much worry about something ugly happening in the chimney.

And as you can see, instead of logs, I have stuff in my hearth. candles. A vase. A work of art – an enameled copper plate made years ago by an artist friend of my brother-in-law. At Christmas, this all gets augmented with poinsettias.Nice big festive flaming-red poinsettias.

Turns out that, in terms of the environment, by not firing up my fireplace, I’m onto something. Turns out that burning wood in your own fireplace is a big contributor to air pollution. At least in Europe, so I’m guessing that – even though we have more wide-open spaces and big skies – it works the same way here in the good old US of A.

This is becoming a big deal in Britain, where wood burning – in fireplaces and in wood-burning stoves – has caught fire.

About 175,000 new wood-burning stoves are sold in Britain each year. In 2015 an official survey found that 7.5% of Britons burn wood at home, usually to provide a little extra heat (most wood-burning households have central heating) or because they like looking at flames. Wood-burning is fashionable and seemingly environmentally friendly, since trees can be replanted. It is also, unfortunately, a big contributor to air pollution in Europe.Gary Fuller of King’s College, London, an air-pollution expert, has calculated that wood-burning is responsible for between 23% and 31% of all the fine particles generated in the cities of Birmingham and London. These particles, which are less than 2.5 micrometres (thousandths of a millimetre) in diameter, are blamed for various respiratory diseases and lung cancer. In fact, pollution from wood-burning seems to be falling gently, despite the rush to install stoves—perhaps because new stoves are cleaner than old ones, and much cleaner than simply burning logs in a fireplace. But that is still a lot of smoke. (Source: The Economist)

One reason for the pollution is that all those wonderfully evocative smelling particulates going up in smoke are doing so in densely populated areas, where pollution is already clustered. Places like Birmingham and London. And Boston.

The situation is even worse in Denmark.

Domestic wood-burning supplies about 3% of Denmark’s energy consumption but accounts for 67% of fine-particle emissions.

Unfortunately, they’re predicting that the spring cold-spell continues for a while here in Boston.

By mid-April I’m usually switching my winter clothing out for spring stuff. I always keep a few un-seasonal things on hand for those cold days in summer and unseasonably warm days of winter (which we do occasionally get, even in this bill chill of a winter freezing its way into spring).

So I’m guessing that my wood-fire-warmed neighbors will continue stoking their fires for another couple of weeks.

Environmental impact-wise, however, sounds like we’d all be better off throwing on another fleece rather than another log.