UKH

Oh!
interesting and surprising reading. 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/27/wood-burning-stove-en...

Yes, the wood burning Facebook page I'm on makes light of the story, but unfortunately he usually makes sense (to me).

These articles come up monthly in the Guardian. I can't measure particles directly but CO levels don't move with ours when reloading, so I am sceptical. The snide class warfare remarks add to the general hatchet job feel.

There have been scientific articles citing the great increases in respiratory illnesses from studies done in Sweden: so there is objective back up for the (agreed) reactively put piece by George Monbiot. It is usually better just to state the facts.

The phasing out of wood burning stoves in London is based on the problems with the environment, as far as I know.

Much depends on the state of the fire when you open the door. If the fire is smouldering and producing a lot of smoke that's not going anywhere fast, wisps of smoke, sometimes more, will certainly exit the burner into the room; if there's a strong flame going and a good draw, not so much. 

When this has been discussed on here in the past, a poster with the relevant kit claimed that PM 2.5 levels in a room with a burner on didn't increase at all.

My view is that they're not great in urban environments, and if you must use them in winter then do so when most people are indoors (i.e. after 5.30pm) and on windy days. Unfortunately the coldest days tend to coincide with still air . . .

Monbiot's "middle-class" jibe is off the mark, certainly in Kendal; he should take a quick peek at the chimneys on the Hallgarth estate.

Im perplexed by this. I had a burner installed a few years ago. I see the smoke it creates as it gets up to temp, and also when I add a new log.

I dont have internal smoke unless its really cold and still outside, sub zero, and I use a gas burner to prime the flue to limit this. Theres only me with an active burner in my close proximity.

I live in a new home, 12 years old, chalet bungalow. The large lounge is a single level protrusion which has significant glazing across a quarter. Both these facts mean that the lounge, where the log burner is fitted, gets cold. The family wears sensible clothing indoors and only heat the home when necessary. 

It has a large radiator underneath the window but this means we need to gas on longer and hotter to warm it up as the heat seems to be 'exchanged' with the coldness of the windows, which are new, double glazed - it isnt an ideal design but is the only option given the layout. We can limit the gas used by having the burner lit and staying in the lounge until bed.

We are on a private drive with one other home close-by. They never complain of smoke as we only ever have it on after dark or a cold day when we are home. I check to see that their windows are closed.

The wood I have is very seasoned over a few years, dried off more in the home. It was scavanged by me from local council work plus from a local surgeon who has dropped off some excess. I have 2-3 years left. The trees weren't felled for me alone and if I didn't burn them someone else would.

Do I stop using the burner? Use more gas to keep the house warm? Avoid the lounge? It's a tough one Ive been pondering more and more lately. 

https://www.tomforth.co.uk/guardiancomments/ never felt more appropriate

I just did a bit of googling, and it looks like if you're worried about opening the door and putting another log on, you'd best not even think about owning a toaster.

I find the false equivalence between climate change and local air quality interesting.

On the one hand you have catastrophic climate change leading to ecological distruction with mass extinctions, the forced migration of people from areas unable to continue to support populations due to rainfall reduction etc. Greenhouse gases have incredibly long lives in the atmosphere meaning the emission of CO2 now, will continue to cause issues long into the future. 

On the other hand, you have local and temporary increases in the risk of individual harm to building occupants and those in the neighborhood. The toxins produced are generally stripped from the atmosphere due to their volatility or weight, so do not amount to a "species level" catastrophic risk. Humans have been burning biomass for millennia and it has never presented a climate destroying risk. 

Prioritising the short term reduction in risk to your own family, over the future of the planet, could be seen as the ultimate in selfish behaviour and a total failure of utilitarian risk assessment.

(Obviously using 100% renewable energy which demonstrates additionality will result in no local harm and no climate change and could be seen as a win)

Also worth noting that the first figure in the report he (very selectively!) quotes the "deaths" figure (it's not a deaths figure) from suggests that pm2.5 concentrations are lower than they've even been.

So yeah, we all know smog is bad and co2 is bad and this is a hard question to answer. He doesn't get to strut smugly around the guardian offices pretending he's nailed shut the wood/gas dilemma based on that one page of weakly researched, selectively quoted bullshit.

Ok the more I look into this the more pissed off I'm getting. 

He says "Even a modern, approved, “eco-friendly” wood burner produces 750 times as many fine particulates as a heavy goods vehicle". Linking an article, but selectively missing off the critically important word "...engine", which is all that article talks about, from the end of the statement. 

In the CMO report he cites but clearly hasn't read, 

"In 2000, non-exhaust emissions (NEE) from brake wear, tyre wear, and road surface wear were estimated to be 5.8% of total UK PM10 emissions and 4.9% of total PM2.5 emissions. In 2016, this increased to 8.5% of total UK PM10 emissions and 7.4% of total PM2.5 emissions." accompanied by a figure (on p75) showing what that looks like relative to the exhaust emissions he's pointing at.

He might have a point or might not, but he's deliberately out to mislead either way.

"middle-class" jibe is off the mark, certainly in Kendal; he should take a quick peek at the chimneys on the Hallgarth estate.

Given the house prices in Kendal I think large swathes of the privately owned houses on the Hallgarth estate are 'middle class' (whatever middle class means nowadays.) 

Ever read into nanoparticle generation from 3D printers?  Then look at the vast range of filaments being bought from online marketplaces by people printing at home.  Should only be used in a HEPA filtered enclosure or an outbuilding IMO…

Yes, and it's why I built an enclosure* for mine. PLA is supposed to be ok-ish though, right?

*- upturned ubiquitous stacking plastic storage box with a fan and some dryer hose 

You just get angrier every time the paper's name is mentioned

https://www.economist.com/international/2018/04/05/wood-burning-stoves-are-...

The problem needs some good quality research as we just don't know how big it is. The government certainly got its first look very wrong as it included all burning (including outside bonfires). From what we do know I think it's currently inappropriate (in the context of a geopolitical generated energy crisis made worse by a broken UK energy market and failed regulator) to be 'particle shaming' responsible people with an efficient modern stove when using properly dried wood.

It's not just toasters we need to consider...stuff gets charred in ovens and ocasionaly elsewhere indoors.... and damp bonfires or fires in damp woodlands are a lot worse... and industrial fires worse still.

It's impressive how small things can generate huge amounts of smoke: I was witness to a houseful of smoke last year when someone forgot they were making stock from chicken bones and went for a walk with me instead. All the smoke came from that pan!

Yep. They just keep doing this. Contextless number picking with the implication that they're awful numbers when actually they might or might not be. Would not be suitable for publication in anything respectable.

Agree with rest.

Do you mean The Economist?

I prefer to blame the experts that produced the scary numbers that were not accurate (and then didn’t retract them properly, when some industrial experts fairly 'knocked holes' in the analysis), rather than journalists that rightly worry about such scary sounding data.... especially given industrial lobby pushback to most environmental harm is too often dishonest.

The classic example: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/feb/23/revealed-migrant...

They choose not to mention that 6500 out of an estimated 1.5 million, taken on its own, over the 10 years would actually imply it's a ridiculously safe place to relocate, which we all know it isn't.

They're as bad as the daily mail. Only difference is they're usually saying things we'd all like to believe.

Agree that more high quality research is needed. This is the most detailed report I've found up to now.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/...

That's the one cited in the article

If his stoves were releasing  clouds of black smoke and soot he maybe needed to get his lums swept or stop burning plastic....

On your Qatar argument you are guilty of exaggerating in the opposite direction: 6500 known deaths of only a large fraction of the 1.5 million migrant workers whos' deaths are monitored, isn't a low number given they were not all there ten years. The article is clear that deaths don't all link directly to construction accidents given the examples. The accusation is these people are exploited borderline slave labour living and working in inappropriately unsafe conditions (and of course the country has blocked independent investigations into that).

Comparisons with The Fail output is a completely false equivalence... there is plenty of data on forced reporting retractions. Plus the Grauniad (flicks holy water and crosses oneself) regularly indicate they have altered articles that contained incorrect or misleading information.

Does it help reduce pm2.5 if the toaster is a trendy dualit one on a polished bamboo worktop and paired with freshly made bread from a bread maker using rare variety of spelt and Tibetan pink salt from Waitrose? If I start reading the Guardian and drive a GWiz disabled carriage instead of my Zafira would that help too?

Again, https://www.tomforth.co.uk/guardiancomments/

You're reading things I never wrote again.

Not denying, or even attempting to address that. Just pointing out that they have used a number that would suggest the opposite of what they suggest it suggests.

Exactly. Anyone who has read anything about how to use a stove knows that closing them down to smoulder when you go to bed is exactly what you shouldn't be doing. You should be using seasoned dry wood, getting the stove up to operating temperature as fast as possible, running it at that temperature, then letting it burn out with plenty of air when you're done.

Maybe you need to be clearer about what exactly is wrong with the article then, as the idea it's somehow an exemplar of bad journalism seems very odd to me...in particular I see no way 6500 deaths of migrant workers in ten years can be regarded as a low number.  Maybe I'm just being dim but as things stand you look rather compulsively obsessed (and plain ridiculous in saying the paper is as bad as the Fail)... you should maybe stick to the joke links (which are funny as the Guardian has plenty to take the piss out of... especially on lifestyle stuff and opinion articles).

Given that I grew up in a house with an open coal fire, built bonfires as a kid, burnt stuff in ovens, and spent 40 odd years working surrounded by petrol fumes, exhaust smoke, weedkiller and God knows what else. I'll probably not live much beyond my 90's like dad.

On the subject of health and exposure to substances. The one member of my family to suffer a significantly early death was my grandfather on my mother's side. He and his brother ran a quarry and both died in their 40's from dust inhalation. This isn't to say that other members of my family weren't affected by the environment they worked in (Rail yard, Pottery industry) but as all made it to their 80's without significant health problems I suspect the effect of environment was minimal

What The Bacons think of The Guardian (NSFW):

This is exactly my point. Is it a high number? Is it? They choose not to mention that it's 6500 out of  a big number. Even the most basic thought process can surmise that people tend to die on the order of about once every 100 years or so, so if they all stayed* and the demographics were average*, how many of them would you expect to die in that period? 

*- can argue that neither of these is correct, but still, adjust for those however you like and give me a number you'd expect. 

Only after you've come up with a number, listen to the more or less episode about it: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02sftfp

There's no doubt construction in Qatar is costly in lives, but the 6500 figure in that article is nowhere on the logical path to deducing that.

It would be a very interesting project to visit people that think they know what is best, and measure heat in the room, heat out the chimney, use of fuel, pollution in the room and outside.   It's complicated. There would be some surprises.

Sorry only just saw this post

Yeah, just as bad to be fair

Except that's not what's happened here. The report with the "deaths" figure in surrounds it with caveats and drums into the reader at great length, with citations, the limitations of how those figures (that aren't a number of deaths, and attempt to address nox, not just pm2.5, which he's suggesting by omission are exclusively to blame) were arrived at. The journalist has gone with 'x deaths' due to air pollution.

Well, while you're busy doing that I'll carry on burning my logs and staying warm.... having lived in plenty of cold, damp houses I'll take my chances with all that evil stuff coming out the chimney ...

The migrant workers were mainly young men very few of whom of would have been there if too unhealthy to work (likely being sent back home), and too many of whom died in what remain unexplained circumstances. I make it 7500 assuming ten years on the Guardian average number of 1.5 million, with them all staying in Qatar to die if too ill to work (assuming death rates of 0.5 per thousand in one year). So yes if they were never sent home if ill you might expect roughly the same number (allowing for the significant fraction of migrant workers whos' deaths were not monitored) but thats not likely to have been what happened. Hardly an exceptional piece of bad journalism.

Guardian says "shocking figure". Basic maths says figure not at all shocking.

Not disagreeing with what they're trying to draw attention to. Have problems with the out of context, and actually in that case completely irrelevant, numbers with all caveats removed followed by instructions to be upset about them, which far too many UKCers dutifully and thoughtlessly follow.

Me too. 

If you're not going to do it,  I hope someone else will.  Would be very worthwhile.  Make a TV program to pay for it as a competition and to disseminate the undoubted valuable lessons learned from the know it all entrants.

It's a journalistic article not a scientific paper and written in contrast to FIFA and Qatar claims of high standards of treatment. The numbers look high to me in any western context but are not unexpected for the likely situations these migrants faced, rather than the lies we were sold in the sportswashing.

UKCers only significantly follow bs in Grauniad numbers in your obsessive imagination.

Just re-listened to that old More or Less episode... it adds nothing to an uncertain situation (and the sarcasm grated: about death rates of fit medically tested young men working in a claimed high tech building industry simply being less than the average death rates of the same age group in India as the TU guy rightly said, thats comparing apples and pears).

Pleased to hear that it didn't seem to affect members of your family, but there is an increased risk of conditions such as lung cancer associated with increased exposure to pm2.5 soot. It's only visible if you statistically compare populations rather than looking at a few individual outcomes.

Incidentally, this baffled researchers for a while because the traditional theory of the cause of cancer was genetic damage and pm2.5 (for example) increases cancer incidence but isn't known to cause genetic damage.

One of the more interesting articles I read this year was on the changes in thinking about the underlying mechanisms that causes cancer, which has relevance to this thread

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-62797777.amp

Another article here that would seem to support the argument with links to studies;

https://theconversation.com/like-having-a-truck-idling-in-your-living-room-... 

I certainly hardly ever use mine now having made similar decisions to Monbiot around the same time and gradually realising its not a great solution for me or my (urban) neighbours. 

It really doesn't because we don't know the UK levels emitted and stove output depends massively on what and how you burn. Most urban areas already have strict smoke controls and the best way to solve any future evidenced problem in urban areas would be to ban stoves.

I wouldn't deny there is an increased risk, just that we are a long way off the bad old days before the 1956 clean air act. It is still good sense to mitigate exposure to things detrimental to health but beyond a certain point I believe it is pot luck.

I find it interesting that of my family starting with those born after 1837 to the present, out of 41 people 7 died before age 60 mainly of silicosis and other lung diseases and war injury (mainly pre- 1960). between ages 60 and 79 16 died of mainly strokes and heart failure with 2 of cancer. From ages 80 to 100+ one died of cancer the rest (17) of heart failure, stroke and other causes. All lived in areas of heavy industry. I suppose you could argue we are blessed with good genes.

I have discounted infant deaths of which there were many in the 19th century and early 20th century

Find it hard to care. 

I had to decide on a heating option for my flat this winter. It has no heating currently, and it got too much in the recent cold snap. 

I have a chimney, that used to be a fire, but is now blocked off. 

Options were gas central heating (lose cabinet space in kitchen, and have to run pipes and radiators through the house), or a wood burner. 

I have opted for the wood burner. 

There are countries where wood burners are the primary form of heating. Places like Norway/Sweden have them in most homes, and Swedes aren't dropping dead in crazy numbers are they? 

In Sweden your life expectancy is 82.41 years old, whereas in the UK it is 80.9.. 

In Sweden the cancer rate is 271 per 100K, and in the UK it is 296.1 per 100k. 

Maybe I am supposed to live until 120 years old, but frankly.. Do I want to? Never seen anyone over 100 who looks like they're having a good time. 

And my parents used to have an open fire, burning coal, on the regular. If anything is going to kill me, it'll have been that during my childhood. A sealed unit wood burning stove, really doesn't seem like much of a potential health hazard to me. 

I mean shit, I'm looking to take up trad climbing this year..

And the environmental concerns are a great big 'Whatever' for me. I fly all over the world regularly, to go touch rocks for fun. The idea of pretending to give a shit about the impact of my woodburning stove seems laughable in that context. 

How much flying does Mr Monbiot do, I wonder?

 

Brilliant. 'Whatever', eh? It really is all about you, isn't it?

You're right though: if you ignore the environment, it will just go away.

How does smoking 20 cigs a day compared to the danger of a wood burner. Is the smoke equally toxic?

So, just did a quick forum search of your name and specified the 'Destinations' forum. 

You seem to have been to (or at least have intimate knowledge of): 

* Tasmania 

* Poland

* Spain

* India 

* Yosemite 

And if your logbook was open to the public, I imagine I could add to that list substantially. So lets not chuck stones, ay?

At least I'm honest that I don't greatly care about the environment, in regards to issues that will directly impact my enjoyment of life. I'll do my bit, sure. But not if it causes great expense, or stops me enjoying the one life I get. 

In the grand scheme of things, a woodburner is small fry. To pretend to take a moral high ground, while going on 4 plane holidays a year, would make me a total hypocrite. 

I don't use the 'logbook' thing either here, or anywhere else. So it's neither 'public' or 'private' - it just doesn't exist.

Fair one, I figured the best onights, best redpoint, etc was populated automatically from logbook entries. Guess it's not. 

Either way, is that really the thing worth addressing from my post? 😂

he describes the wood he got delivered by a ‘local contractor’ as being ‘lichen encrusted’. I’m wondering whether he’s just got a load of freshly felled wood from a tree surgeon rather than two year seasoned dry wood or kiln dried <<20% moisture?

I had several trees down the summer with late stage ash dieback.  I’ve yet to find a log from one that’s measuring > 20% moisture even on a fresh split down the centre.  The combination of a very long dry summer and perhaps 5% of typical foliage pretty much dried them out. Bark on the logs is encrusted with fresh lichen.  I’m taking those at < 15% and drying them next to the stove before burning them.  A most unexpected windfall.  If my experience is anything to go by, there could be an unexpectedly high amount of logs out there legally classifiable as firewood with fresh lichen.

I’ve started to feel really bad about the lichen, having got a bit into the subject this year. But there was no circumstance where it was going to have a happy ending…

An insane amount of softwood is starting to rot out in the northern plantations a year on from Storm Arwen.  Plenty of landowners haven’t made any effort to recover the timber for various reasons.

In reply to various:

The article’s author is either clueless or being deliberately provocative with his “class” take on things; northern pit villages still have plenty of retired miners who burn their NCB concession on open fires with back burners for their domestic hot water and central heating; our neighbour did this up to his passing in his late 90s.  I doubt those open back boilers have anything like the control over emissions a modern wood stove does.

That's interesting; we have some Ash dieback felled this year <20% - I thought we had a dodgy meter!

It isn't.

I've travelled a bit over my lifetime.

But I am not the person who wrote 'I find it hard to care', 'whatever', and 'I fly all over the world regularly to touch rocks for fun' in my post.

You really don't care about your environmental impact, do you? It really is all about you.

But he said, in the article "mostly wealthy ones" and he's a journalist for the guardian. He must simply have forgotten the citation. He wouldn't just be making shit up, would he?

I think ash has unusually low moisture - it will burn fresh. But regardless, it doesn't take that long for split logs of stove size to dry. 

This quote is very misleading:

”Even a modern, approved, “eco-friendly” wood burner produces 750 times as many fine particulates as a heavy goods vehicle.”

If you read the article that it hyperlinks to you quickly learn that the truth is that the regs governing stoves allow for 750x the number of particles. But that is not to say that any stove actually emits particles to that extent.

I don't like the comparison to a HGV idling.

Although I'm conscious of the pollution my woodburner produces, I think a HGV idling in my living room would kill me. While I've never noticed any adverse affects from the woodburner. 

Also, despite there being quite few people burning wood and coal in the small town which I live, the air quality seems much better than in most cities, so perhaps this offsets some of the problem? 

agreed, that’s been my experience with all the Ash I’ve had taken down over the last year or two, with a lot of trunks cut up into table tops etc. There’s no legislating for the conditions a ‘contractor’ stores cut wood however. The journo’s account of black smoke, soot, fumes is either typical journalist bs, or likely, wet wood. A lot of the Ash around here gets felled when it’s dangerous by the council or just blown over and left in place. What’s lying around Froggatt Bridge is getting scavenged and sawn up by locals. It’s lichen covered, disease cored and absolutely soaking.

Here in Germany our esteemed journalist would be ringing around the builders because his installation must be fitted with particulate filters by 2024. The cheerfull man in black (the local authority chimney sweep) will also be checking the stove cannot be operated with the doors open, cannot be shut right down and that the external air supply is sufficient. He helpfully measures the particulates emitted, both into the room and from the flue as well as the airflow feeding the fire with all doors and windows closed (nowadays due to the blower test requirements all stoves need a dedicated air supply directly connected anyway).

Interestingly studies by the government show the fine particulates inside houses is around five times that of outdoors, stove or not and that older (leaky) houses the level may actually drop with use of an internally air supply stove as it literally sucks them in and sends them up the flue.

Rather than his an outright ban a certain amount of control might be a more reasonable solution.

<gammon>

More bloody EU red tape blah blah blah

</gammon>

I have a great deal of respect for George Monbiot and his writing, but I think he misses several important points in his article, and it looks as though he's not burning wood properly to avoid particulates entering his room.

I've been burning wood in stoves for decades, and found that:

• It's infinitely better to have a small woodburner running hot than it is for a big one kept on tickover. A hot flue draws much better than a cold one. The burn is much cleaner. It's less likely to belch out smoke from the door on reloading wood and gunk up the flue with creosote deposits. There's also less smoke from the chimney because the gases and particulates are mostly burned.
• It's best not to have the burner smouldering overnight, as more smoke is produced and therefore  more creosote will gunk up inside the flue = more sweeping required. Creosote corrodes steel flues over time.
• If the burner has not been used for a while, there's often a stubborn plug of cold air obstructing the flue, preventing initial draw and smoking into the room. This can be shifted by blasting a hot hairdryer up above the baffle for a few minutes before lighting.
• Wood needs to be less than 20% moisture content. A moisture meter is a must-have. Contractors are only too willing to sell you unseasoned wood, so test it before buying. There should be lots of ash wood around due to dieback, and it so happens that ash is the best wood for burning. It seasons very quickly.

Seen all the giant fans the EU are putting up to blow all the UK's air pollution back?

In reply to:

This thread reminded me of the quote below from Sheridan Le Fanu.

"One of the most remarkable phenomena connected with the practice of mendacity is the vast number of deliberate lies we tell ourselves, whom, of all persons, we can least expect to deceive."

Has anyone answered the most important question yet.

If wood burners are so bad why does whisky taste so much better when sat in front of a fire?

I sometimes think he goes on a bit. Describing the Lakes as a 'wasteland' seems a bit OTT; and he's downright 'specist' about sheep. 'They're from Mesopotamia' he wrote contemptuously in one article.

I'll do some research tonight.

Im doing it now.

Yum

Me too

Of course carefully sourced and dried wood raises no taxes for the government? 
We are being skilfully manipulated towards paying more for everything plus removing ‘free’ goods? 
What next? Tax fresh air? 

If you take the Guardian article at face value then a pack of 20 cigarettes would kill you just by looking at them.

I've no doubt that wood smoke is bad for you, but so are most things. Being cold and stressed about about energy bills aren't exactly good for you. 

Might encourage its preservation?

”First they came for our cheap flights and I said nothing as it’s actually more convenient to drive to Morzine with all the ski kit than it is to fly. 
Then they came for our diesel cars but I said nothing as I can afford an EV and as a business owner the BIK breaks make them very reasonable.

Then they came for our central heating but that’s ok as our old boiler needed replacing and we just dug up the side lawn to put in a ground source heat pump, again the subsidies were pretty good.

Finally they came for our wood burners, that’s when I decided George Moniboit was a charlatan misrepresenting the data and being selective in his arguments”

What next? Tax fresh air? 

They do around here, we have "luftkurort" which is like a form of health spa area and tourists pay a tax for the pleasure of breathing the fresh air, even ones dog pays!

Seriously?  If you can, good for you, but how many people do you suppose can responsibly obtain a steady supply of firewood without buying it?

Privatise it! 

youtube.com/watch?v=LwchQgSBHDM&

Even as a child I collected wood/sticks and logs. It’s the hunter gatherer in me! 
we lived on a council estate but had an open fire. I walked to the fields most days and collected wood. Never paid for it in my life. 

I completely agree.  The only time our wood burners make any soot or smoke is when someone has set them up wrongly and they aren't running at the right temperature (get a thermometer).  You can't even tell whether the fire is running from outside because no smoke comes out of our chimneys except during the first couple of minutes when they are first lit.  There's no soot and what's left in the grate is clean wood ash, which can go straight on the garden. I clean them out and I've never had a coughing fit while I do it.   

One thing that I haven't seen said about wood burning stoves when comparing their particulate emissions with other sources(eg diesel vehicles) is their use.

In some areas of the UK and where they are a major source of heat they will be on for a few months each year. In milder areas such as the south east and where there is another source of heating, much less so.

We have a multi-fuel stove rather than a wood burner but because we have a small source of wood, wood is sometimes burnt in ours. In the recent cold spell we had it on every day for a week or so. However, because we have another source of heating and due to recent mild winters that was the first time it had been on in the last three years.

Although vehicles might produce a much lower level of particulates than a wood burner many, if not all, are used pretty much every day of the year.

Dave

I used to cut scrub and manage woodland (including in Trowbarrow!) as part of a conservation group. This meant I had as much 'free' wood as I could cart away. All I had to do was cut, split and dry the stuff in the 'kiln' - the old shed roof where temps would get really high under the black felt. The landscape got looked after and we kept the house (and cats) warm. I once brought a big chunk of driftwood home from the shore. When I threw it in the stove there was an explosion of flame. I think it must have been impregnated with fuel oil? That was a lesson learnt - stick to natural wood.

Good for you.  But that isn't the norm, which is just as well really because if everyone did that it would be a bit of an environmental disaster. 

I'm not thinking about smoke or carbon emissions, more that every scrap of dead and fallen wood getting hoovered up would have a very very detrimental effect on the wildlife (starting with insects maybe, and percolating up the food chain).  That might have been bad enough if all the other kids on your estate were doing the same thing back in the day, but it's really something we can't afford to be happening now.

I agree with that. Nowadays we tend to collect from friends who have had to cut back trees etc. Leaving it to season for 2 to 3 years. There has been a lot of cutting back near me recently for a new school being built. That wood probably gets sold on by the council. 
I think most people can’t be bothered to collect wood and prefer to buy other forms of heating. But that is a whole other area of debate. I’ve seen maps of huge areas damaged irrevocably in the pursuit of gas and oil in Russia and Kazakhstan ( a family member was a geologist ) 

You would be surprised. My hubby has worked on a few clearance jobs and the company had to pay to dispose of the material. Anything that can be will be chipped (up to maybe 6" or more), speak to contractors and they will often give it away.

Obviously you need to be willing to collect, cut to length, split, stack and wait a year or more for it to season.