Dieter’s tools show how bad the air can be if you live near wood burners. Experts are impressed by the results and his perseverance.
Because it is an underestimated problem, experts say: the particulate matter in the air caused by wood burners. It increases the risk of all kinds of nasty diseases, from lung cancer to heart and cerebral infarctions. It leads to hundreds, perhaps thousands of deaths every year.
Yet warnings seem to fall on deaf ears. If there is no wind and a wood burning alert applies, heaters and fireplaces will still be turned on. In some neighborhoods, heaters are so popular that the sky turns gray-blue from the smog.
Council of State
That is also the experience of Dieter Pientka from ‘s Gravenpolder in Zeeland, a village where many wood stoves are still used. According to him, these are mainly economical heaters: people who have to burn all day, including at night, to keep the house warm.
To the frustration of Dieter and his wife. They have already successfully gone to the Council of State. He criticized the municipality for not having done a proper investigation into the nuisance. Dieter then used a simple particulate matter meter in his garden. RTL Nieuws wrote about it at the time.
‘We are not taken seriously’
Not much has changed in the meantime. Yes, a more serious investigation was carried out by municipal enforcement officers, but his neighbor was able to continue burning. “We still have the feeling that we are not being taken seriously. That our objections are being dismissed,” says Dieter. “We want the municipality to take enforcement action. That could be anything, but not doing anything, we don’t agree with that. As a municipality you could say: we want you not to burn in certain wind directions.”
De Zeeuw will soon go to court again. Now he is even better prepared, because a year ago he received a professional particulate matter measuring device from the Rijnmond Environmental Service (DCMR), a device that the RIVM also uses for research.
“We were surprised and very happy that we got our hands on such a device. Something like that would normally have cost 30,000 euros.” The device was economically depreciated and made available to Scapeler, a platform of citizen scientists.
After a winter-long study, the striking conclusion is: on average 50 percent of the particulate matter in the air around his house appears to come from wood smoke from stoves and fireplaces. That is much higher than the national average (4 percent, see box).
Nationally 4 percent
The contribution of Dutch wood burning to the total particulate matter concentration (particles smaller than 2.5 micrometers) in the Netherlands is approximately 4 percent. More than half is determined by emissions from abroad.
If we look purely at national emissions, particulate matter from wood smoke is responsible 23 percent of the total. That is more than all the particulate matter from road traffic.
20 to 30 times higher
At many times the concentrations at Dieter’s house were much higher. There were times when the values rose to 200 or even 300 micrograms of particulate matter per cubic meter of air, while 10 micrograms per cubic meter is considered normal: 20 to 30 times higher.
Dieter just wants to point out: particulate matter from wood smoke should not only be measured at a national level, but also in the neighborhoods. He wrote there with a co-author a big report on itand hopes that the government will also take this report seriously.
How do you know that particulate matter comes from wood smoke?
To determine what part of the particulate matter came from wood combustion, he compared his measurement results with official stations in the area. The higher values on his measuring equipment could always be explained by the fact that the wood smoke could also be smelled during the measurement. “There are no other important sources of particulate matter in my immediate living environment. In this way we have more or less closed it off.”
But how reliable is such a report by citizen scientists? RTL Nieuws showed the report to some experts in the field of air quality. One of them is the Flemish Jordy Vercauteren.
Vercauteren is impressed by the study. He says that it is ‘at a level that far exceeds the average citizen scientist’. According to him, the research shows that Dieter ‘very often experiences significant discomfort’. “I think the investigation was well conducted.”
What does this say about other places?
The scientist does have some comments: this was measured in the winter and more often in the evening. The values therefore mainly say something about the measured period and that specific location. “It is difficult to say what it says about the air quality in other places. For that you would have to measure in many more places.”
It is therefore difficult to provide a national picture, as the RIVM tries to do. The values could be different two streets away because there happen to be no wood stoves nearby. “Measurements should actually be representative of a fairly broad environment. Micro-environments should be avoided. Unfortunately, wood-burning stoves form hundreds of thousands of micro-environments. It is a somewhat complex legal and measurement-technical story.”
Lars Hein, professor at Wageningen University, also read the report. The research also seems ‘reliable’ to him and he is not surprised by the outcome.
Residents exposed to higher values
He also points out to this scientist that the share of wood combustion is lower on average nationally, but that residents are often exposed to higher values. “All those emissions from wood burning occur in people’s living environment. Some of the emissions from industry end up via chimneys in higher air layers and therefore contribute less to the concentration in the immediate living environment.”
The RIVM monitoring network has relatively too few points, says Hein. “As a result, we do not actually have a good picture of the particulate matter values that people are exposed to.”
Hein also sometimes measures values of 100 micrograms on his own particulate matter meter when his neighbors stoke the wood stove. “There are slowly becoming very few neighborhoods where there is no heating. A lot of heating is being done exactly where people live. This is an underestimated public health problem.”
You could say: what is Dieter concerned about? “They must be your neighbors,” was one of the many responses to X last year.
The scientists stand up for him. “We should be grateful to people like Dieter,” says Vercauteren. “The theme is very sensitive, politicians rarely want to ban something, certainly not something that many people experience as pleasant. But people like Dieter are the victims of this.”
In addition, many people prefer not to bring it up. That makes Dieter’s case so special. “The polluter has a familiar face, your neighbor. And that personal aspect also makes it much more sensitive than anonymous air pollution from traffic or industry.”
2700 premature deaths
Professor Lars Hein states that the health effects of particulate matter are still underestimated. He points out that wood burning contains a relatively large amount of ultrafine dust (smaller than 1 micrometer) and also carcinogenic PAHs. Ultrafine particles penetrate deepest into your lungs, he explains.
“Particulate matter particles that are let through the alveoli can end up in your blood. Wood burning therefore not only increases the risk of lung cancer, COPD, asthma and bronchitis, but also of heart and cerebral infarctions. Both for you and your neighbors. A rough, perhaps An underestimation is that in the Netherlands there are approximately 2,700 premature deaths per year, but this figure is uncertain because the precise contribution of particulate matter from wood combustion to the concentration at national level is not well known.”
2024-02-05 08:19:35
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