13 ms·

Air quality double whammy from domestic firelighters

58 points by Kaibeezy 3y ago

Kaibeezy 3y ago
Kerosene paraffin contributing 50% of the carbon from a wood fire in the first 15 minutes. Roughly. I only really use them to light the barbie a few times per summer… to cook meat. So a triple whammy, I guess.
KennyBlanken 3y ago
TLDR: kerosene is really terrible for global warming. If "fire starter" logs are this much of a problem, imagine how much global warming is caused by "smudge pots" - sooty, horrifically polluting burners that citrus farmers burn kerosene, used motor oil, hydraulic fluid, etc. in to try and keep their fruit from freezing during a cold snap. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smudge_pot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smudge_pot We really, really need to stop giving agriculture a pass on emissions.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  ... and water usage.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > We really, really need to stop giving agriculture a pass on emissions. Not just emissions, other externalities as well. It's madness to grow alfalfa in California, only to ship it to Saudi-Arabia for cattle feed. Or for Amazon rainforest to be burned down to grow soybeans that are used to feed cattle on fields that were priorly used for soybeans and then ship the meat to the US and Europe. The problem is that consumers want fresh <everything> 24/7/365, and it would use up enormous amounts of political capital to get that under control.
  - labster 3y ago
    Honestly in the California case, the problem is much more about senior water rights than it is about capitalism or freshness demands.
    - mschuster91 3y ago
      Of course the problem is capitalism, to be precise: the lack of a mandate to price in externalities - not just water rights, but also CO2 and other pollution, destruction of extremely large swaths of land or devastation of biodiversity by ever larger monoculture farms - into the actual sticker price of products. Something like the alfalfa or Brazilian meat trade should be exorbitantly expensive, as should be stuff like strawberries from Morocco or cut flowers from Kenya to Europe. The emissions associated with these products are absurdly large, and yet it's cheap enough to be worthwile.
      - _3u10 3y ago
        Capitalism actually fixes that, Brazilian beef and argentina and paraguay for that matter too are extraordinarily cheap because tariffs make them expensive in the US / EU. Luckily we like beef so we eat it all ourselves. You get moral superiority we get cheap high quality meat, everyone wins.
        Symbiote 3y ago
        I don't think there's much demand for South American meat here in Denmark, but vegetables and especially fruit from Africa and South America is easily affordable and available when it's not in season in Europe. Capitalism has failed to take account of the environmental cost.
        _3u10 3y ago
        Fruits and veg are generally twice the price in the EU, stuff that is grown largely or only here is more like 4x the price in the EU. Coffee, avocados, etc. https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Paraguay&city1=Asuncion&country2=Denmark&city2=Copenhagen&displayCurrency=EUR https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou... These prices are a little high too, if you drive to Clorinda in Argentina (15 - 20 mins), it's about half the price. EU Cattle farmers disagree with you, without tariffs your ranches would be crushed, or more politely made redundant. It's pretty expensive, https://www.dw.com/en/what-does-eu-mercosur-trade-deal-mean-for-ranchers/a-66203231 https://www.dw.com/en/what-does-eu-mercosur-trade-deal-mean-... "This would have a very negative effect on the price our producers receive, and this would discourage farmers from taking over farms," said Benoit Cassart, secretary-general of the Belgian Cattle Trade Federation. "Premium, high-quality meat holds great value in Europe. That's not the case in China, for example. We are hopeful that the European market will open up to Brazilian meat with the finalization of the agreement," Marina told DW. "That doesn't mean they are producing something bad. But if they must remove the Amazon rainforests to produce meat and send it to Europe, and this makes our green pasture redundant, it makes no sense at all," he told DW.
- userbinator 3y ago
  From the description of that article you linked: This one has been recently lit off, as the exhaust on a fully hot pot becomes almost invisible with a mere hint of red/orange flame. They're normally not that sooty.
- paganel 3y ago
  And then what should we put on our tables? And at what cost?
  - _3u10 3y ago
    Bugs, they will be supplied with your pod. Your pod likely won’t have a table. You will eat the bugs and live in the pods.
noughtme 3y ago
For anyone unfamiliar with the term firelighter, they are talking about fire starters. Are these that widespread that they are concerning? I thought they were mostly for lazy outdoors people. I use newspaper with olive oil to start charcoal grills. Never had trouble starting a fireplace, wood stove or camp fire with anything other than tinder. Fire starter tablets often contain hexamine which I don’t really want close to my food.
- christkv 3y ago
  With a bbq chimney I’ve never need to use anything but newspaper to get the coal going.
  - arghwhat 3y ago
    The idea of a conversation about the most environmentally friendly way of igniting coal is quite amusing.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - noughtme 3y ago
      Charcoal and coal are quite different.
      - rootusrootus 3y ago
        At the same time, the most common form of 'charcoal' that an average person will use in their BBQ is made from both charcoal and coal, as well as other things.
        nielsbot 3y ago
        standard charcoal briquettes contain coal? i’m amazed to hear that. (I use lump charcoal myself which seems to give to food a better smoke flavor)
_3u10 3y ago
[flagged]
- TheGigaChad 3y ago
  [dead]
Ekaros 3y ago
It seems that using biomass in small scale is quite complicated. At least if other than CO2 emissions are considered. You can't have either too wet or too dry fuel. You need right amount of air and right temperature. And then you even need to consider things like how the fire is started.
- _3u10 3y ago
  It’s not, almost every developing country has figured out how to make charcoal.
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    Have they figured out how to burn that charcoal with minimal particle emissions? Every time some is burned?
londons_explore 3y ago
It's obvious that those firelighters make a lot of carbon particulates. Just burning one and looking at the flame, thick black smoke comes off it. I suspect the cellulose is the cause, rather than the kerosene. Perhaps the problem is that the kerosene burns at a lower temperature than the cellulose, and liquid kerosene can act as a decent heatsink via the specific heat of vaporization, therefore preventing the cellulose getting hot enough to properly burn.
userbinator 3y ago
Incidentally, common plastics (PE, PP) burn much more cleanly than these firelighters, and also charcoal. I've read about others using waste packaging made of these materials to light charcoal fires. (Don't use PS, PC, or anything chlorinated like PVC --- the emissions from burning those are far more toxic.)
acyou 3y ago
Reading this was a little frustrating, as it appears to be written by authors who have never operated a wood-burning stove, and don't have a great grasp of how fire works. "In this study, we present air quality and climate effects of previously unrecognized aerosol source, i.e., kerosene-based firelighters that emit more BC than all biomass fuels put together." Black carbon is formed by incomplete combustion. When temperatures are low, and/or fuel is wet, of course there won't be complete combustion. Of course if you light just a firelighter it's going to throw off a lot of black smoke. Every fire does this when you first start it, because temperatures are low. Same goes with crude oil and coal. Fuels burn poorly and give off a lot of smoke without optimal burning conditions. This should be obvious. Firestarters work well as firestarters precisely because they are able to start and burn at very low temperatures. The way that they do this is by emitting a large quantity of organic aerosols and black carbon particles at very low temperatures. In a cold environment, the mixture won't have enough heat to fully combust. If the authors tried throwing a firestarter into a hot fire, they would have seen that it burns relatively cleanly, just like coal and oil would. Then the authors burn peat, which has an unbelievably high surface area, and think that it burns more cleanly. And of course the tests were done by igniting a cold sample, so that it would be a "controlled test", instead of a bomb calorimeter style test. What the authors are doing is reminiscent of using calories measured using a bomb calorimeter to measure how much energy the human body gets. It's garbage science that sounds plausible and has lots of pretty charts, but doesn't hold up to cursory inspection.

58 points by Kaibeezy 3y ago

Kerosene paraffin contributing 50% of the carbon from a wood fire in the first 15 minutes. Roughly. I only really use them to light the barbie a few times per summer… to cook meat. So a triple whammy, I guess.

KennyBlanken 3y ago

TLDR: kerosene is really terrible for global warming. If "fire starter" logs are this much of a problem, imagine how much global warming is caused by "smudge pots" - sooty, horrifically polluting burners that citrus farmers burn kerosene, used motor oil, hydraulic fluid, etc. in to try and keep their fruit from freezing during a cold snap. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smudge_pot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smudge_pot We really, really need to stop giving agriculture a pass on emissions.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
actionfromafar 3y ago
... and water usage.
mschuster91 3y ago
> We really, really need to stop giving agriculture a pass on emissions. Not just emissions, other externalities as well. It's madness to grow alfalfa in California, only to ship it to Saudi-Arabia for cattle feed. Or for Amazon rainforest to be burned down to grow soybeans that are used to feed cattle on fields that were priorly used for soybeans and then ship the meat to the US and Europe. The problem is that consumers want fresh <everything> 24/7/365, and it would use up enormous amounts of political capital to get that under control.
- labster 3y ago
  Honestly in the California case, the problem is much more about senior water rights than it is about capitalism or freshness demands.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    Of course the problem is capitalism, to be precise: the lack of a mandate to price in externalities - not just water rights, but also CO2 and other pollution, destruction of extremely large swaths of land or devastation of biodiversity by ever larger monoculture farms - into the actual sticker price of products. Something like the alfalfa or Brazilian meat trade should be exorbitantly expensive, as should be stuff like strawberries from Morocco or cut flowers from Kenya to Europe. The emissions associated with these products are absurdly large, and yet it's cheap enough to be worthwile.
    - _3u10 3y ago
      Capitalism actually fixes that, Brazilian beef and argentina and paraguay for that matter too are extraordinarily cheap because tariffs make them expensive in the US / EU. Luckily we like beef so we eat it all ourselves. You get moral superiority we get cheap high quality meat, everyone wins.
      - Symbiote 3y ago
        I don't think there's much demand for South American meat here in Denmark, but vegetables and especially fruit from Africa and South America is easily affordable and available when it's not in season in Europe. Capitalism has failed to take account of the environmental cost.
        _3u10 3y ago
        Fruits and veg are generally twice the price in the EU, stuff that is grown largely or only here is more like 4x the price in the EU. Coffee, avocados, etc. https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Paraguay&city1=Asuncion&country2=Denmark&city2=Copenhagen&displayCurrency=EUR https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou... These prices are a little high too, if you drive to Clorinda in Argentina (15 - 20 mins), it's about half the price. EU Cattle farmers disagree with you, without tariffs your ranches would be crushed, or more politely made redundant. It's pretty expensive, https://www.dw.com/en/what-does-eu-mercosur-trade-deal-mean-for-ranchers/a-66203231 https://www.dw.com/en/what-does-eu-mercosur-trade-deal-mean-... "This would have a very negative effect on the price our producers receive, and this would discourage farmers from taking over farms," said Benoit Cassart, secretary-general of the Belgian Cattle Trade Federation. "Premium, high-quality meat holds great value in Europe. That's not the case in China, for example. We are hopeful that the European market will open up to Brazilian meat with the finalization of the agreement," Marina told DW. "That doesn't mean they are producing something bad. But if they must remove the Amazon rainforests to produce meat and send it to Europe, and this makes our green pasture redundant, it makes no sense at all," he told DW.
userbinator 3y ago
From the description of that article you linked: This one has been recently lit off, as the exhaust on a fully hot pot becomes almost invisible with a mere hint of red/orange flame. They're normally not that sooty.
paganel 3y ago
And then what should we put on our tables? And at what cost?
- _3u10 3y ago
  Bugs, they will be supplied with your pod. Your pod likely won’t have a table. You will eat the bugs and live in the pods.

noughtme 3y ago

For anyone unfamiliar with the term firelighter, they are talking about fire starters. Are these that widespread that they are concerning? I thought they were mostly for lazy outdoors people. I use newspaper with olive oil to start charcoal grills. Never had trouble starting a fireplace, wood stove or camp fire with anything other than tinder. Fire starter tablets often contain hexamine which I don’t really want close to my food.

christkv 3y ago
With a bbq chimney I’ve never need to use anything but newspaper to get the coal going.
- arghwhat 3y ago
  The idea of a conversation about the most environmentally friendly way of igniting coal is quite amusing.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - noughtme 3y ago
    Charcoal and coal are quite different.
    - rootusrootus 3y ago
      At the same time, the most common form of 'charcoal' that an average person will use in their BBQ is made from both charcoal and coal, as well as other things.
      - nielsbot 3y ago
        standard charcoal briquettes contain coal? i’m amazed to hear that. (I use lump charcoal myself which seems to give to food a better smoke flavor)

_3u10 3y ago

[flagged]

TheGigaChad 3y ago
[dead]

Ekaros 3y ago

It seems that using biomass in small scale is quite complicated. At least if other than CO2 emissions are considered. You can't have either too wet or too dry fuel. You need right amount of air and right temperature. And then you even need to consider things like how the fire is started.

_3u10 3y ago
It’s not, almost every developing country has figured out how to make charcoal.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  Have they figured out how to burn that charcoal with minimal particle emissions? Every time some is burned?

londons_explore 3y ago

It's obvious that those firelighters make a lot of carbon particulates. Just burning one and looking at the flame, thick black smoke comes off it. I suspect the cellulose is the cause, rather than the kerosene. Perhaps the problem is that the kerosene burns at a lower temperature than the cellulose, and liquid kerosene can act as a decent heatsink via the specific heat of vaporization, therefore preventing the cellulose getting hot enough to properly burn.

userbinator 3y ago

Incidentally, common plastics (PE, PP) burn much more cleanly than these firelighters, and also charcoal. I've read about others using waste packaging made of these materials to light charcoal fires. (Don't use PS, PC, or anything chlorinated like PVC --- the emissions from burning those are far more toxic.)

acyou 3y ago

Reading this was a little frustrating, as it appears to be written by authors who have never operated a wood-burning stove, and don't have a great grasp of how fire works. "In this study, we present air quality and climate effects of previously unrecognized aerosol source, i.e., kerosene-based firelighters that emit more BC than all biomass fuels put together." Black carbon is formed by incomplete combustion. When temperatures are low, and/or fuel is wet, of course there won't be complete combustion. Of course if you light just a firelighter it's going to throw off a lot of black smoke. Every fire does this when you first start it, because temperatures are low. Same goes with crude oil and coal. Fuels burn poorly and give off a lot of smoke without optimal burning conditions. This should be obvious. Firestarters work well as firestarters precisely because they are able to start and burn at very low temperatures. The way that they do this is by emitting a large quantity of organic aerosols and black carbon particles at very low temperatures. In a cold environment, the mixture won't have enough heat to fully combust. If the authors tried throwing a firestarter into a hot fire, they would have seen that it burns relatively cleanly, just like coal and oil would. Then the authors burn peat, which has an unbelievably high surface area, and think that it burns more cleanly. And of course the tests were done by igniting a cold sample, so that it would be a "controlled test", instead of a bomb calorimeter style test. What the authors are doing is reminiscent of using calories measured using a bomb calorimeter to measure how much energy the human body gets. It's garbage science that sounds plausible and has lots of pretty charts, but doesn't hold up to cursory inspection.