Environmental Issue: Wood Burning Fireplaces

Environmental Psychology considers two issues with wood burning fireplaces. What's important to you? Your home environment for emotional support or saving the environment?

If you plan to move to a new home or to build a home, you may draw a line through a fireplace as a necessity. Although people love the warmth, comforting crackling sounds, aromas, and moving light a wood burning fire provides, fireplaces can emit polluted air into your home and into your neighborhood.

Most home shoppers request a fireplace. Home buyers desire a hearth, which symbolizes home. Families gather around the fireplace during holiday celebrations and quiet conversations. Book lovers enjoy curling up next to a fire on a cool afternoon. Many new homes feature fireplaces in the main bedroom. After all, what’s more romantic than a fire?

According to the U. S. Department of Energy, wood-burning fireplaces emit nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, organic gases, and particulate matter. These pollutants can cause serious health problems for children, pregnant women, and people with respiratory problems. Like cigarette smoke, some of these elements contain cancer-causing properties.

Some urban cities have considered banning wood-burning fireplaces altogether to stem the flow of pollutants in the smog-filled air. Some California cities and counties have enacted local ordinances to limit the growing wood smoke problem. Mammoth Lakes, Squaw Valley, Cloverdale, Fresno, and many cities and counties in the Bay Area permit installation of only U. S. EPA certified wood-fired appliances in all new construction. Since 1991, the Bay Area AQMD has issued advisories for a voluntary no-burn program on poor air quality nights, "Spare the Air Tonight. "

But wait! Solutions exist so you can enjoy your fire. To keep pollutants from entering your room air, you can install a certified clean-burning fireplace insert and a glass screen. Buy a carbon monoxide monitor and an oxygen-depletion sensor to ensure safe air. The new fireplace systems keep pollutants from leaving your chimney.

Other considerations for you to ponder include the source of heating for your home. What happens when natural gas demand outpaces production? Prices skyrocket. And if your heat comes from a coal-burning electrical plant, doesn't the burning coal produce toxins that pollute the air?

If you're building a new home, consider installing a Pellet Stove, the most efficient and least polluting of the new stove designs. Pellet Stoves provide less than 1 gram per hour of particulate emissions. Most of these stoves s require electricity and burn compressed wood waste formed into pellets.

Be kind to yourself and to the environment. Consider these environmental issues when you light up your fire.

Copyright © Jeanette J. Fisher. All rights reserved.

Global Warming: MEAT THE TRUTH (full length • widescreen • 4 subtitle languages)

The Three Main Parts Of A Tree

Trees can be broken down into three main parts: the roots, the leaves and the woody structure between them. The roots' function is to bring raw materials-water and mineral salt dissolved in water-to the tree. The leaves absorb carbon dioxide from the air and use the sun's light energy to combine this gas with the moisture from the roots, thus making the simple sugars that are the basic nutrients of the tree.

The trunk, limbs, branches and twigs hold the leaves in position to receive the life-giving sunlight and air; they also act as transportation, carrying raw materials between roots and leaves. The materials absorbed by the roots are pulled up by capillary attraction and the osmotic action induced by evaporation of water from the leaves. Loss of water through the leaves is called transpiration.

On a summer day, a single birch tree may transpire 700 to 900 gallons of water. It is this enormous flow of water that causes a continuous flow of sap from the roots to the topmost twigs.

In planting or transplanting a tree, and in building on a lot where you wish to preserve the trees, the gardener's chief consideration must be to protect the root structure of the tree. The big roots near the stem anchor the tree to the ground, while the fine root hairs at the ends of the rootlets absorb the water from the soil.

The stem or trunk of a tree has three parts: the bark, the wood and the pith. The pith is the central part and around it is the wood. Between wood and bark is the cambium, a thin layer that produces new wood and bark. When the cambium ring is severed, as by a wire cable, the tree is killed, and since the cambium protects against insects and disease, anything driven into it can wound the tree severely.

Outside of man himself, trees have countless enemies.

There are 200, 000 known kinds of insects that attack trees, in addition to diseases such as blight, rust and rot, storms and droughts. Luckily, birds help to keep caterpillars, borers, beetles and other insects in check.

ECOLOGY NEWS - Formosa (Taiwan) helps to conserve the planet with trees