Anyone else live in an area where woodburners have increased tremendously?

I can no longer enjoy the winter as the hard smell of woodsmoke lingers in the streets almost always.
So I am locked inside with air purifiers.

Don't get me wrong, I love a camp fire in the middle of nowhere, but this idiotic government policy here to increase taxes on natural gas is leading to a huge increase in woodburners in homes, and some burn impregnated wood, which leads to incredibly toxic fumes.

It'll likely be banned in a few years, it's really getting out of hand, there was a national debate about it a few days ago, but all it lead to was stricter rules on the sale of new woodburnerrs in 2020, which doesn't solve a thing.

People are ignorant about how toxic woodsmoke really is. It is much worse than cigarette smoke, or car exhaust.

Despite Finland being mostly trees (the rest is lakes) burning wood at home isn't all that common. Some of the older houses do and there are a fair few woodburning saunas, but most of the woodburners are out in the woods at the summer cottages meaning you only ever smell smoke when it's your sauna you're warming

Rat Man wrote on Jan 24^th, 2019 at 2:13pm:


It's becoming an epidemic here. Last week, for 4 days straight, the air over our whole country was close to as bad as in Beijing. It's all because of the tremendous increase in woodburners.

Mersa wrote on Jan 24^th, 2019 at 4:41pm:


Depends on what fossil fuels you are talking about. Natural gas burns 1000x cleaner than wood. Electricity and heat created by centralized, modern coal power plants with large filtration systems is much cleaner than a hundreds of thousands of highly inefficient woodburners, that do not have any filtration system at all.

Right up to about 2010 my country had quite clean air. Then it all went down hill, due to massive tax increases on natural gas, decreased production and closure of coal powerplants. What is the result? 1 million more woodburners in a country of 17 million. In my street alone, there are 6. Now most of the winter time, many, many days the air is thick and smoggy. I've bought expensive filitration system with HEPA and active charcoal filters so atleast inside the pollution is low. It's really getting out of hand. I never thought my country would slide down into a second and third world air quality index. To hell with the greens  and the European Union with their CO2 madness for causing this honestly

Well I think that as a tree guy , wood is good.
Oldest bits of timber your likely to burn are under 1000 years old .
Fossil fuels are way way older.
Trees sequest Carbon.
Mostly everything else releases it in a relitive shot time.
Fossil fuels are basically super old forests of carbon.

In all humans suck and ruin everything.
But it's mainly our scale.
Too many people.

Mersa wrote on Jan 27^th, 2019 at 5:37pm:

This