From the ‘those are fighting words’ department and the UNIVERSITY OF SURREY. Just wait until they get a load of the “coal fired pizza” in Texas.
The pizza slice that comes at a price
Scientific report announces emerging risk caused by wood burning stoves in pizza restaurants and charcoal in steakhouses to the environment
A recent study has shown that emissions in major cities caused by restaurants such as pizzerias and steakhouses using wood burners can be damaging to the urban environment.
The findings published in the journalAtmospheric Environment points out the underlining pollution causes of the Latin American city of Sao Paulo in Brazil. This work is a collaborative effort by ten leading air pollution experts from seven universities, led by the University of Surrey’s Dr Prashant Kumar from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, under the umbrella of University Global Partnership Network (UGPN).
The Latin American megacity of São Paulo is the only megacity worldwide that uses a much cleaner bio-fuel driven fleet. With about 10% of Brazil’s total population, Sao Paulo’s inhabitants fill their vehicles with a biofuel comprising of sugarcane ethanol, gasohol (75% gasoline and 25% ethanol) and soya diesel.
Dr Kumar said: “It became evident from our work that despite there not being the same high level of pollutants from vehicles in the city as other megacities, there had not been much consideration of some of the unaccounted sources of emissions. These include wood burning in thousands of pizza shops or domestic waste burning.”
Despite feijoada (a pork and bean stew) being the often hailed Brazil’s national dish, pizza is revered by the residents of Sao Paulo. The ‘pizza day’ is celebrated every July and the neighbourhood pizzeria is the Sunday dinner with the family venue for most of the city’s residents. People of all ages line up for hours outside pizzerias every Sunday evening and the city is home to around 8,000 pizza parlours that produce close to a million pizzas a day and can seat up to around 600 people a time. In addition to the 800 pizzas a day being made using old-fashioned wood burning stoves, a further 1,000 a day are produced for home delivery, with Sunday being the busiest day of the week.
Dr Kumar continued, “There are more than 7.5 hectares of Eucalyptus forest being burned every month by pizzerias and steakhouses. A total of over 307,000 tonnes of wood is burned each year in pizzerias. This is significant enough of a threat to be of real concern to the environment negating the positive effect on the environment that compulsory green biofuel policy has on vehicles.”
Co-author Prof Maria de Fatima from the University of Sao Paulo added, “Although the huge number of passenger vehicles and diesel trucks are the dominant contributor to particle emissions, at least we understand the impact that this is having on the environment and can factor in solutions. The important contributions to particle emissions gained from burning of wood and the seasonal burning of sugar cane plantations need to be accounted in future studies as they are also significant contributors as a pollutant.”
Additional co-author Prof Yang Zhang from the North Carolina State University explained, “Once in the air, the emitted pollutants can undergo complex physical and chemical processes to form harmful secondary pollutants such as ozone and secondary aerosol. While most studies in Brazil have focused on impacts of vehicle emissions on air quality and human health, the impacts of emissions from wood/coal burning and meat-cooking in pizzerias and restaurants are yet to be quantified”
In addition, another part of the problem is the impact of the neighbouring Amazon rainforest. Biomass burning from the south southern edge of the forest can be transported across the Atlantic coast to Brazil and had to be included in the qualitative assessments of the city air pollution.
Citing this recent work, Dr Kumar, continued: “We believe that the contents of this new direction article provide an unprecedented approach in examining the adverse impact of air pollution in such a unique megacity as São Paulo.”
Professor Vince Emery, Senior Vice-President of Global Strategy and Engagement, University of Surrey commented: “This is another excellent example of how global challenges such as air pollution in cities need global networks to identify the problems and ultimately create innovative solutions”.
Paul Smith, Associate Dean in the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences, University of Surrey added “It is great to see that the seed funding invested by UGPN partners has facilitated internationally co-authored work in such an important research area”.
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Um … any chance this is all a smokescreen (pardon) to cover up for the possibility that their huge “clean fuel” Hippy-Juice initiative didn’t reduce the air pollution as much as promised? Could these folks be looking for an “overlooked” scapegoat?
MfK
June 18, 2016 at 1:48 am
I must really take exception to the remarks about “looking at the ammo inventory” and “locking up” the nut jobs. That puts us on the level of the the nut jobs, who must resort to force rather than have a provable case.
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I read and understood the remark to be checking that one had the means to defend oneself when the “nut jobs” come for us. Note: “nut jobs” does not exclude the government agencies!
SteveT
From the January 18, 2016 issue of The New Yorker …
FIRE STARTER
Forbes March wasn’t always in the firewood business. He spent three seasons on the ABC soap opera “One Life to Live,” playing the doomed winery owner Nash Brennan, who falls to his death through a skylight window. Soon after, in 2009, March quit acting, moved to Jeffersonville, New York, and established the New York Firewood Company. The firm now supplies kiln-dried, plastic-wrapped bundles of logs to seventy-five restaurants and hundreds of private residences in and around New York City.
[ … ]
Last year, as part of an effort to protect the city’s air quality, Mayor Bill de Blasio signed a law prohibiting the installation of any new wood-burning fireplaces, and mandating that wood burned in a preëxisting fireplace have a moisture content of twenty per cent or less, by weight.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/01/18/fire-starter
I have a grandfathered fireplace in California. New ones are not allowed.
There are fireplace police with IR detectors to enforce that I only use mine on approved days, that never seem to include cold winter nights….
BTW, the only “open fire” allowed is in a bbq grill, and that is only due to lobbiest pressure… but you must have something nearby to put on the grill when the fire truck rolls up, or you get a ticket for air pollution. So keep a few hotdogs near when lighting… don’t know if they will let you go in the house to fetch them… (I showed my plate of dogs and the fire commissar took his truck away… and advised about the meat waving defence…)
The Peoples Republic of Kalifornia, where fire is illegal… cook your tofuburger with a windmill, or else.
If I fell to my death I wouldn’t wait three years to stop acting!
As I have said previously, on another site,
a “green” is a person who lays awake at night, wringing their hands, and wetting their beds, filled with fear and and angst, that out there, somewhere, there is someone who is happy.
They will find no peace until everyone is as miserable as they.
I’ve heard that applied to Puritans before. Of course, Greens are nothing if not modern Puritans.
Tell that to DRAX wood fire (using US wood in the UK)
and if ANYONE want to tell me I can’t have a wood-fired pizza when I want one..
…… they better be a whole lot bigger and more aggressive than I am.
Well, this is crazy on its face as many commenters have already noted by this time. It is horrific “science”. It is another example that the universities and the scientific endeavor collapsed starting in the late 60s sometime. (I was there for the start of it)
What CO2 does, if anything, is still an open question. All charts and graphs that I have seen tell us that the planet warms up first and then CO2 goes up. This is true on all time scales. Does that not tell anyone anything?
During this century there has been no warming at all even as CO2 levels have gone up dramatically. Is that not a real scientific test of some sort?
And then there is the fact that no one has ever proved that CO2 warms the surface anyway. Perhaps it does warm it a tiny bit or perhaps it cools the surface on net. But we just don’t know — and yet make thousands of “scientific” predictions, all false, on the basis of an unknown. This is just WAG. (wild assed guess)
Gigatons of taxpayer funding + pseudoscience + PR companies + captive media = what we have now. It’s disgraceful, and we’re paying for it (in more ways than one).
Those pizzas leave their CO2 birthplace very hot. The further they get from the CO2 the cooler they get! The magic molecule!
It would be crazy if they were not replanting. Thats what I had planned for dinner tonight. Pizza on the Weber Grill! charcoal of course but with hard wood charcoal.
Hold on now, wood is renewable therefore it is a more desirable energy source that fossil fuels, right?
Fossil fuels are renewable. You just have to be patient that’s all.
In just 30 years, peat has started forming on lake bottoms in the St. Helens blast zone. Nature isn’t wasting time putting all that freshly dead wood and its carbon content to good use.
Coal is wood. No really. From live trees, to dead trees, to peat, to coal. Decomposition, compacting, and heat all work to concentrate the carbon, resulting in a much more energy dense fuel.
Steel mills use a similar process to make coke, essentially a super-coal. Normal coal is cooked under pressure in furnaces to concentrate the carbon even more. Coke fuel burns hotter, so it more efficiently reaches the temperatures necessary to smelt pig iron into steel.
Interesting case of double think in Paris. As far as I’m aware the following is still the case, after an attempt to ban wood fires in the city. The new regulations on open wood fires in homes across Paris, states:
1 The use of open fires is allowed for the auxiliary heating of the household
2 Wood used in stoves, fireplaces and hearths must be eco-efficient
3 The use of open fires as the main heating source for a home is prohibited
Because of particulate pollution the Paris authorities are starting to ban diesel vehicles from the city, starting with the oldest, pre-1997 I think but could be wrong.
Modern diesels using Ultra low sulpher fuel and anti pollution systems using DEF (Diesel Exhaust Fluid) have very low harmful emissions. In fact these days the exhaust from these diesels is sometimes cleaner than the ambient air in heavily urbanized environments.
As for my steaks and other home grilled or smoked foods. They’ll have to take my grill and smoker from my cold dead hands.
The “study” is a half-baked one. Furthermore, it does what Greenie-soaked, carbon-obsessed “scientists” always do; confuses and conflates CO2 with actual pollutants. These sorts of studies always come off as a confused mishmash of conflicting ideas.
Yes, let’s compare a city’s pizza ovens with the wholesale burning of sugarcane fields. The smog here in Santiago is horrible at times in the winter. The city was built in a geographic bowl with not a lot of breezes. We have a lot of pizza shops here too so that must be what makes it worse. That or all the millions of poor people using wood and other fuels for heat because gas and electricity are so expensive due to socialist leaning government taxes here. But I would focus on the pizza ovens. Rich people eat pizza. That is where your answer lies.
In the interests of saving the planet, I will never eat a wood-burning pizza oven again.
This reminds me of what the unwritten motto of the California Air Resources Board (CARB) was when I lived there–If we can count it, we will regulate it. They were requiring afterburners on bakery ovens to limit alcohol emissions, and heavily fined a commercial yeast manufacturer.
I cant belive this sh…also the German Greens will say Wood is good!Germans gover. have given Millions of Euros to people who installed Wood Heating Units.The Greens say this is good because wood came again and again….
So whos right now?Haha…
Focus on the real problem – Indoor Cooking without Chimneys
7 million premature deaths annually linked to air pollution
Burden of disease from Household Air Pollution for 2012
Shouldn’t those people be punished for polluting the environment?
Are traditional bakeries next? Or has everyone in the world learned to not mess with the price of bread lest you lose your head? If that is the case, then they have forgotten that pizza dough is bread.
What a ridiculous article. Surely the burning of those sugar cane fields and the deforestation to provide all that ‘bio fuel’ their cars run on has nothing to do with it…..oh no! Its the pizza…of course it is, makes perfect sense. Especially when you are offering or supporting a competing business to the pizza industry(or supporting a chain that doesn’t use wood fired ovens…always follow the money).
The whopper of the article is how many pizza joints Sao Paulo has! WOW! Now I want to go on a pizza vacation.
Already underway in California. The smell of baking bread is a pollutant, so must be eliminated. see note above from Tom Halla.
Just wait til they go after the breweries, then you will see a real revolution…
A carbon tax is often promoted to “carbon pollution”.
How about a wood tax?
But then the question becomes, how much wood would a wood tax save if a wood tax would save wood?
So diamonds are Carbom is there a special Carbon tax on them?
FFS … other than that, there are no words.
BAN THE BBQ!
You know it makes sense.
By the exact same reasoning, this means that they’re going to have to attack good old low-and-slow barbeque.
It would be quite enjoyable to watch the result of that effort, especially from my vantage here in NC.
And folks wonder why it is hard to get real BBQ in California… If it smokes, CARB gives you a fat fine.
These same idiots also want to keep the third world from clean energy and want them to keep on burning dung, wood etc. to cook.
No problema – as long you don’t bake a pizza with that dung.
Dung fired pizza, perhaps a little to earthy tasting for me.
It depends on how closed the stove is:
http://burningissues.org/car-www/science/pah-comp-wood-coal.htm
“In addition, another part of the problem is the impact of the neighbouring Amazon rainforest. Biomass burning from the south southern edge of the forest can be transported across the Atlantic coast to Brazil and had to be included in the qualitative assessments of the city air pollution.”
Please excuse my ignorance of geography…Why does biomass burning in Brazil have to cross the Atlantic coast to get to the coast of Brazil?
Surely some Texan has invented an oil fired pizza oven?
That would be weird. I’m watching a BBQ cooking show set in Texas right now. They use wood in all their smokers. Part of the discussion was about what wood is available in which parts of Texas. Closing quote from the show’s moderator: “There’s nothing like cooking real meat with real wood.”
Living in a city that still allows wood burning fireplaces I can assure you that local air pollution does exist, in the cooler winter months when there is little air movement (temperature inversions are common here) the adverse effects of these fireplaces can be quite debilitating to walkers by. I am in good health and I have trouble sometimes catching my breath in these areas of our city.
In the end, I consider that wood burning is not a good idea in large urban areas from a local air pollution standpoint.
It is a question of concentration of pollutants really. One wood burning stove/fireplace is not an issue, twenty in a small area can be a real problem. Where do you draw the line?