Heating with wood more harmful than car exhaust fumes
Heating with wood has been criticised not only since yesterday. Too much particulate matter, too much soot. That is why the President of the Federal Environment Agency has now called for heating with wood to be dispensed with altogether. Wood stoves in Germany now produce more particulate matter than all the lorries and cars put together.
There are about eleven million wood stoves in Germany. Heating with wood, however, releases a lot of fine dust, but also nitrogen oxides and other harmful gases, and the soot it produces is very harmful to the climate and to health. Fine dust is responsible for over 53,000 premature deaths per year. The German Environmental Aid DUH assumes that heating with so-called logwood stoves is more harmful to the climate than, for example, heating with gas heaters. As far as particulate matter is concerned, wood-burning stoves even release almost three times as much as exhaust gases from road traffic. Exhaust emissions cause "only" 6,800 tonnes of particulate matter, while fireplaces cause an incredible 18,600 tonnes.
The older the fireplaces, the more pollutants they produce; this is especially true of fireplaces and tiled stoves. That is why the federal government encourages the installation of new heating systems that are fed with wood pellets, for example, with the federal subsidy for efficient buildings (BEG). The federal subsidy for such a heating system can be up to 45 percent. A phase-out of wood-fired heating is not planned so far. However, it will be examined by the middle of the year whether these subsidies will continue to exist.
The Federal Environment Agency takes a rather critical view of burning wood. Wood does have the reputation of being a climate-neutral raw material. But this is only true if the wood from which the more environmentally friendly pellets are made actually grows back at the same rate so that the carbon balance remains neutral. This is not so easy, because firstly, wood does not grow back at the same rate as it is burned and secondly, the felling, processing and transport of the raw material also causes further pollutant emissions. According to the German Environmental Aid, anyone who has an open fireplace should consider switching to a wood-burning stove. These are also available with dust collectors or filters that reduce fine dust by 80 percent and ultra-fine dust by as much as 90 percent.
Given that wood stoves cause more air pollution than cars and trucks, banning or retrofitting old stoves would only be sensible and necessary. Old vehicles have already been banned in environmental zones for years, even though the level of fine dust is higher at home than on the roads.