Wood, burning

Organic compounds are a major constituent of the FPM at all sites. The major sources of OC are combustion and atmospheric reactions involving gaseous VOCs. As is the case with VOCs, there are hundreds of different OC compounds in the atmosphere. A minor but ubiquitous aerosol constituent is elemental carbon. EC is the nonorganic, black constituent of soot. Combustion and pyrolysis are the only processes that produce EC, and diesel engines and wood burning are the most significant sources. 

Whenever unvented combustion occurs iadoors or when venting systems attached to combustion units malfunction, a variety of combustion products win be released to the iadoor environment. Iadoor combustioa units include nonelectric stoves and ovens, furnaces, hot water heaters, space heaters, and wood-burning fireplaces or stoves. Products of combustion include CO, NO, NO2, fine particles, aldehydes, polynuclear aromatics, and other organic compounds. Especially dangerous sources are unvented gas and kerosene [8008-20-6] space heaters which discharge pollutants directly into the living space. The best way to prevent the accumulation of combustion products indoors is to make sure all units are properly vented and properly maintained. 

The increase in residential fuelwood consumption over this period parallels the sharp increase in costs of oil, natural gas, and electricity and can be tracked by the number of wood-burning stoves in homes. Between 1950 and 1973, the estimated number of stoves dropped from 7.3 million to 2.6... 

Also, wood fuel is low in sulfur, ash, and trace toxic metals. Wood-fired power plants emit about 45% less nitrogen oxides, NO, than coal-fired units. Legislation intended to reduce sulfur oxides, SO, and NO emissions may therefore result in the encouragement of wood-burning or cofiring wood with coal. 

If a person has the choice of installing oil, gas, or electric systems to heat a house and believes that any one of the three would perform equally well, the system that is cheapest is the efficient choice. If, however, the individual compares heating with an oil furnace to heating with a wood-burning stove, monetary cost may not be the only consideration. 

The environmental occurrence of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons is mainly associated with dispersion of oil products and with various types of combustion. For these chemicals a kind of pre-industrial background exists, due to forest fires or to domestic wood burning. The sediments of the deepest strata were certainly deposited in the nineteenth century, when no significant industrial activities had been initiated. The ratio between PAH concentrations found in the sediments dated to this century, and the deepest ones, vary from 1.7 to 30, increasing from the beginning of the... 

I recalled again the freed workers in the Farben administration building at Frankfurt, burning records to keep warm — and, later, the wood-burning trucks moving under Ernst Struss s direction from that building to the new document center at Griesheim. I mentioned these events. Half-hopefully, I said "You don t think there s any chance they vanished at that time "... 

Comparing rural with "typical" urban samples (2nd entry, Table 5), we find that fossil carbon predominates in the urban particulate matter, and the converse. A significant amount of biogenic carbon is found in the urban samples (even in the absence of wood burning), however and this may be related to vegetative emissions. For example, besides fossil fuel indicators such as... 

The phenanthrene/anthracene series is shown in Fig. 7 and the major peak in the m/z 234 trace has the retention index of retene which is generally derived from conifer wood burning. Sometimes there is a triplet of peaks in the same C4 plot due to benzonaphthothiophenes (C10H16S) which are components of some... 

Range represents total of industrial (100-1000) and residential wood burning (13-63). 

Leonard E.M., Wood Burning for Power Production, Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, LA-7924-MS (informal report), Los Alamos, United States of America, (1979)... 

Kanury A.M. and Blackshear P.L.., Some Considerations Pertaining to the Problem of Wood-Burning , Combust. Sci. andTeckl, 339-355(1970). 

Asbestos-containing cement sheets, millboard, and paper have been used frequently in buildings when wood-burning stoves have been installed. These asbestos-containing materials were used as thermal insulation to protect the floor and walls around the stoves. On cement sheets, the label may tell the plant manager if they contains asbestos. The cement sheet material will probably not... 

Dong JI, Bozzelli JW. 1989. Benzo-a-pyrene levels in several indoor environments with kerosene heaters and wood-burning fireplaces. Chemosphere 18(9-10) 1829-1836. 

Honickey RE, Osborne JS, Akpom CA. 1985. Symptoms of respiratory illness in young children and the use of wood-burning stoves for indoor heating. Pediatrics 75(3) 587-593. 

Yttri, K. E., Dye, C., Slordal, L. H., and Braathen, O. A., Quantification of monosaccharide anhydrides by liquid chromatography combined with mass spectrometry Application to aerosol samples from an urban and a suburban site influenced by small-scale wood burning. Journal of the Air and Waste Management Association 55(S), 1169-1177, 2005. 

Vegetative burning was found to account for as much as 40% of the total particulate mass on cold winter days, or nearly 9% annually. This led to the identification of a source of 6500 tons/year of previously uninventoried emissions and prompted major efforts to reduce impacts from residential wood burning. 

Muir, P. S., Fogwater Chemistry in a Wood-Burning Community, Western Oregon, J. Air Waste Manage., 41, 32-38 (1991). 

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