Don't burn where we breathe

‘Burning just one kg of wood will pollute 500,000 m3 of completely clean air up to double the level of the current WHO air quality guidelines for fine particulate matter (5 µg/m3).‘ (1)

Wood-fire burners may seem like a cosy, ‘natural’ heating option for a home, but wood is a solid fuel and when solid fuels are burnt they release more fine particulate matter pollution (PM2.5) than burning liquid fuels. This means that burning wood is the dirtiest way of heating your home other than burning coal. Even ‘eco’ wood burners create hundreds of times more PM2.5 pollution than gas or oil boilers, whilst open fires create thousands of times more. (1)

Image from Chief Medical Officer’s annual report 2022: air pollution – GOV.UK

With so-called ‘eco’ wood burners the amount of pollution directly emitted into the owners home is greatly reduced (except when they open them to light them (2)), but they are still releasing smoke containing PM2.5 particles into the local air which will harm anybody breathing outside and infiltrate back into their own home and that of their neighbours.

‘Fine particulate matter (PM2.5) released during combustion [of wood] has the ability to penetrate deep into the lungs and bloodstream, affecting every organ in the body, and leading to or exacerbating various health issues.’ (3)

These health issues not only include various heart and lung diseases and numerous cancers, but also brain diseases like strokes, Alzheimer’s and dementia (4 and 5).

In the UK wood fire burners have been linked to 2,500 deaths a year (6) and are a bigger PM2.5 pollution problem than traffic (7) despite 90% of the time being used for aesthetic purposes rather than out of necessity.

Here in Brussels, even though wood powered heating systems represent less than 1% of domestic heating systems and are only in use seasonally, they contribute to 38% of residential heating PM2.5 pollution, and 11% of all PM2.5 pollution in the capital (8).

Unfortunately there are still no ‘smoke control areas’ as there are in London (9), and barely any regulation of wood powered heating systems.

The new regulations that there are only came into force in Brussels on January 1st 2025 (10) and they include:

Mandating that all new installations are ‘eco-conception’ (which as previously mentioned are still hundreds of times more polluting than a gas fired heating system)
Banning the use of wood fire burners during times of severe pollution levels unless it is your only method of heating. To find out if there is a ‘pic’ of pollution it is necessary to download the Brussels Air app.
Requiring owners of wood-fire burning systems to clean them annually.

It is unclear how rules 2 and 3 will be enforced, and there is no mention of any fines that may be applicable for not complying.

If you have a wood-fire burner in your home and it is only a secondary heating source, please try to use it as little as possible (and ideally never- your lungs and brain and those of your neighbours will thank you!). If burning wood is your primary source of heating try to change this as soon as possible- there are various government grants available to upgrade your heating system to one that is less polluting and better for your health on the Renolution website (11).

Nobody should have to pay for being warm with their health- or that of their neighbours.

Burning wood also has negative climate impacts, and is not a renewable source of energy (12).

If you’d like to write to Bruxelles Environnement to tighten up their regulations on wood-fire burners here’s a helpful template letter for you to use.

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