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The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has called for a nationwide ban on burning solid fuel in its annual air quality report.
Dr. Ciara McManus, director of the EPA’s office on environmental monitoring, said that particulate matter in solid fuel conducts to 1,300 deaths per year, as the very fine particles can lodge in the lungs, enter the bloodstream, and cause damage to the lungs, heart, and organs throughout the body.
Speaking on RTÉ radio’s Morning Ireland, Dr. McManus explained that the EPA now monitors particulate matter levels at 84 locations across the country and at 33 points there was an “exceedance” of acceptable levels according to World Organization guidelines. Of the health.
In Dublin, the excess comes from traffic, but in cities and towns it comes from particulate matter caused by burning solid fuel (peat, wood, charcoal) in open fires and stoves in people’s homes.
The level of particulate matter depends on the quality of the fuel and how it burns.
“Open fires lead to very high levels of these particles that get directly into the air in our living room and also into the air in our environment. That is why we see it so much in towns and villages because you have an accumulation of what comes out of everyone’s house ”.
With the 84 locations that the EPA now monitors, it’s starting to see more and more problems, “in areas where we didn’t know there were problems before because there wasn’t this continuous monitoring, it’s live, we can see what is happening hour by hour.”
The EPA has noticed a particular rise in levels on winter nights between 5 pm and 6 pm when people start lighting fires.
“What we must consider as a country is to consider the feasibility of not only banning smoked charcoal in urban areas, but also all smoked fuels, that is, all solid fuels that emit particles above a certain level.”
The ban on smoked fuels introduced in Dublin in 1990 had been very effective, he said, saving more than 10,000 lives in that period. “A national ban would be the easiest to implement.”
Successive ministers have promised to extend the ban on smoked charcoal across the country since 2015, but it has yet to happen. The Government Program commits to “extend the ban on smoked charcoal to new cities and during the term of government move towards a total ban at the national level.”
But that promise has led to legal hardship and has been challenged by out-of-jurisdiction charcoal dealers who have said such a ban would discriminate against smoked charcoal and give a competitive advantage to other smoked fuels such as grass and wood, which are in widespread use.
Former Environment Minister Richard Bruton said that was a problem and that his plans to extend the ban were delayed.
Along with the commitment to ban smoked charcoal, the Government also intends to publish a clean air strategy by the end of 2020. The key ingredients are a regional focus on air quality, a new approach to suppress the sale of high sulfur content imported fuel from the UK and more air monitoring stations.
Environmental groups have called for a nationwide ban on all smoking fuels, including peat and wood. The difficulty with this is that the poorest and most vulnerable groups in society depend on solid fuel for heating more than any other group, and some viable alternative clean heat source would have to be widely available.
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