Wood Burners could be trebling your Child’s Exposure to Pollution

Aiming to protect young lungs, a new study highlights the dangers of indoor wood burning. Would you knowingly expose your child to three times the ambient air pollution? Reach for those matches and tickle your stove into life and you may very well be guilty of doing just that.

A recent study conducted over the winter months in Wales looked at the exposure of children to particle pollution. The results were eye-if-not-exactly-bronchiole-opening.

52 primary school children living in urban Holyhead and the surrounding countryside were issued with air pollution monitoring rucksacks and let loose, wearing the backpacks to/from home and school. 

While the sample size is undoubtedly modest, the results were overwhelmingly conclusive. The greatest exposure to pollution occurred within the home (not in school or during commuting) largely from indoor wood burning and smoking.  

The dangers of second hand tobacco smoke are well documented, those associated with passive wood smoke pollution much less so. It is telling that particle pollution averaged some 13 micrograms/m3 in non-smoking homes with wood burners, compared to just 3.5 micrograms/m3 in non-smoking homes with no wood burners.

Lighting your stove could therefore be exposing your child to three times more particulate pollution than leaving it unlit. 

The study also found that while indoor cooking and smoking produced short peaks in pollution, domestic heating with wood resulted in long pollution exposures that even lasted overnight. 

On average, rural children were exposed to more particle pollution that urban children, which the authors put squarely down to biomass burning as wood burners were found in 53% of rural homes compared to just 21% of urban homes. This mirrors a 2024 study in Slovenia that helped dispel the notion of clean country air by finding that wood heating in rural valleys can cause particle pollution comparable to the world’s most congested cities.

The Welsh study comes hard on the heels of last October’s peer-reviewed research from New Zealand warning that air pollution was responsible for over 3,000 cases of childhood asthma as well as over 1,000 hospital admissions and 208 early deaths annually across the country, as well as a 2023 study involving 50,000 women in the US that found “higher wood stove/fireplace usage associated with 70% higher incidence of lung cancer.” 

Doctors and Scientists Against Wood Smoke Pollution have long and repeatedly warned “that wood smoke is more carcinogenic than tobacco smoke and more mutagenic than traffic exhaust.”

The conclusions are crystal clear, unlike that not-always-so-salubrious countryside or mountain air, namely:

Those merrily crackling wood stoves may be hygge but they are most definitely not healthy.

And all children deserve to be protected… and not just from passive smoking. So, next time you reach for those fire starters, think of the health consequences both for your family and your immediate neighbours. 

So, next time you reach for those fire starters, think of the health consequences both for your family and your immediate neighbours.