OT Air pollution

[harry]

[Brian Gaff]

This is the daily mail after all! Wood burning stoves I can under stand. They are awful things most of the time. I'm old enough to remember the London Smogs, and to me burning wood in an inefficient way and chucking the results out into the air seems rather anti social. As for candles, well, I'd have thought there were far moor problem areas in industry with pollution. Brian

[Andrew Gabriel]

The Mayor of London warned a few years ago that wood burning stoves were likely to be restrospectively banned in London, for anyone thinking of fitting one. They are a significant and rapidly increasing source of the particulates in city centres. Some testing showed they come nowhere near the emission levels the manufacturers had been claiming to get themselves on the whitelist of products permitted in smokeless zones. Changing this list is easy, requires no legislation, and is retrospective. The only thing holding back London was that the list applies to all of England and either legislation was required to make a separate whitelist for London, or they would need to be banned in all smokeless zones in England. It looks like Gove is planning to devolve the whitelists to local authorities, which is what London had been asking for. (Other countries in the UK have their own whitelists.)