Wood burning in our homes is a key cause of air pollution and has significant impacts both on people’s health and the environment. Domestic wood burning is a clear equity issue and should be addressed urgently by the UK government. Domestic burning in the home is now the largest source of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) pollution in the UK, yet the proportion of people who burn is very small. Only 8% of the UK population own a wood burner, and of these, only 8% burn out of necessity.
This means 92% of people who burn have other forms of heating, further exacerbating health inequalities and disproportionately contributing to a shared problem for everyone.
Stopping the burning of wood and solid fuels in stoves and open fires requires a range of policies and measures from central and local government and industry.
In this report, we outline five critical problems which currently act as barriers to developing effective policy measures to reduce air pollution by phasing out domestic burning:
- Low public awareness of the harms of burning
- Defra approved and Ecodesign labels are leading to confusion around the contribution of domestic burning to air pollution
- Local authorities lack real power and resource to control emissions from woodburning
- The misclassification of wood burning as carbon neutral allows unchecked carbon emissions to accelerate
- Existing and planned homes are currently not set up to disincentivise the installation of wood burning
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