Indoor Smoke Exposure
Every 20 seconds, another person dies from respiratory illness brought on by breathing in household smoke, according to the group Practical Action. That's a staggering 1.6 million people every year - and most of them women and children.
Heating homes in Alaska is a necessity. Firewood is abundant in some parts of Alaska and a wood burning stove may be a practical way to stay warm. Unfortunately, older non-EPA approved wood burning stoves can emit more pollutants than oil fired furnaces - generally 30 to 250 times more particulates and up to 1000 times more Carbon Monoxide on a heat equivalent basis. This is a bigger concern in winter time with particulate levels and their adverse effect on air quality.
There are several chemicals that are released when heating your home in the winter. You may or may not have health problems with these, but children and elders are quickly affected. Over the years exposure may finally make your sick. Some if the harmful chemical substances are carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen oxides (NOx), volatile organic compounds (VOCs), dioxin, and inhalable particulate matter (PM). Some of the VOCs are irritating, toxic and/or cancer causing. One of the biggest human health threats from smoke, indoors or outdoors, comes from PM. Wood smoke PM is composed of wood tars, gases, soot, and ashes. Toxic air pollutants are a potentially important component of wood smoke. A group of air toxics known as polycyclic organic matter includes potential carcinogens such as benzo(a)pyrene. These pollutant emissions can vary depending on if the wood burning stove you use is older or is a newer, EPA certified stove.
There are some basic strategies to improve the air quality in your home. Source control is usually the most effective. Some sources, like poorly vented wood burning stoves and poorly vented kerosene space heaters, can be adjusted or modified to decrease emissions. Source control can usually be more effective than increasing ventilation, which can increase fuel and energy use. If you are using fuel oil for heat, using dirty fuel to run your heater or fuel that has water in it can create an increase in pollutants being released into the air and can damage or shut down your heating source.
Improving ventilation can also decrease air pollutants in your home. Opening windows and doors will increase the natural ventilation rate. Turning on any exhaust fans which are vented to the outside can remove pollutants from the room. Exhaust fans can cause a backdraft of combustion appliances so if there isn't enough replacement air entering the house. When this happens, combustion exhaust products may spill into the house. If your house is sealed up tight with plastic or wrap, you can use a balanced system that includes both exhaust and fresh air. Opening the house in winter may not be practical so here are some tips for wood burning that will help you build an effective fire. Building this fire requires good firewood (using the right wood in the right amount) and good fire building practices.
The following practical steps will help you obtain the best efficiency from your wood stove.
- Season wood outdoors for at least 6 months before burning it. Properly seasoned wood is darker, should have cracks in the end grain, and sounds hollow when smacked against another piece of wood.
- Store wood outdoors, stacked neatly off the ground with the top covered.
- Burn only dry, well-seasoned wood that has been split properly.
- If possible, start fires with clean newspaper and dry kindling.
- Burn hot, bright fires.
- Let the fire burn down to coals, then rake the coals toward the air inlet (and wood stove door), creating a mound. Do not spread the coals flat.
- Reload wood burning stoves by adding at least three pieces of wood each time, on and behind the mound of hot coals. Avoid adding one log at a time.
- Try to use smaller fires in milder weather.
- Remove ashes from the wood stove between uses.
In addition to wood stoves, other sources of combustion products like kerosene and gas space heaters, fireplaces and gas stoves can cause bad air in your home. Using these methods of heating, like wood heat cause major pollutants to be released. These pollutants are carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and particle matter. If your kerosene heater is unvented it can generate acid aerosols.
Combustion gases and particles come from chimneys, stove pipes and flues that are improperly installed or maintained and poorly vented. This contributes to pollution in the air outdoors. Recently the USEPA identified the areas of Fairbanks and Juneau as “non-attainment” areas for fine particle pollution.
Breathing smoke can cause burning eyes, runny nose and bronchitis. Fine particles can aggravate heart or respiratory problems, such as asthma, in people of all ages. Even limited exposure to smoke can be harmful to human health particularly to the health of children, the elderly and those with chronic conditions.
To protect your health and that of everyone who shares your home:
- Use a properly installed, vented EPA certified wood stove;
- Use safe, efficient wood burning practices;
- Follow all additional safe burning precautions;
- Never burn household garbage or cardboard. Plastics and the colored ink on magazines, boxes, and wrappers produce harmful chemicals when burned;
- Never burn coated, painted, or pressure-treated wood because it releases toxic chemicals when burned;
- Never burn ocean driftwood, plywood, particle board, or any wood with glue on or in it. They all release toxic chemicals when burned;
- Never burn wet, rotted, diseased, or moldy wood;
- Only bring into your home the amount of wood needed for a day to reduce the chance of allergy-causing mold spores circulating indoors.
For more information on wood burning stove use, and wood stove change-out programs in your community, see the EPA's Clean Burning Wood Stoves and Fireplaces Program at http://www.epa.gov/woodstoves
Another combustion source that causes poor air quality in your home is tobacco smoke. Secondhand smoke is a mixture of the smoke given off by the burning end of a cigarette, pipe or cigar, and the smoke exhaled by smokers.
Secondhand smoke is also called environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) and exposure to secondhand smoke is sometimes called involuntary or passive smoking. Secondhand smoke contains more that 4,000 substances, several of which are known to cause cancer in humans or animals. Exposure to secondhand smoke can cause lung cancer in adults who do not smoke and it is estimated that exposure to secondhand smoke causes approximately 3,000 lung cancer deaths per year in nonsmokers. Exposure to secondhand smoke has also been shown in a number of studies to increase the risk of heart disease.
Children are particularly vulnerable to the effects of secondhand smoke because they are still developing physically, have higher breathing rates than adults, and have little control over their indoor environments. Children exposed to high doses of secondhand smoke, such as those whose mothers smoke, run the greatest relative risk of experiencing damaging health effects. This exposure can cause asthma in children who have not previously exhibited symptoms. Infants and children younger than 6 who are regularly exposed to secondhand smoke are at increased risk of lower respiratory track infections, such as pneumonia and bronchitis and children who regularly breathe secondhand smoke are at increased risk for middle ear infections.
The California Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) has developed a comprehensive health assessment of environmental tobacco smoke (ETS). This report can be accessed at http://www.oehha.org/air/environmental_tobacco/finalets.html and the Surgeon General released a major new report in 2006 on involuntary exposure to secondhand smoke, concluding that secondhand smoke causes disease and death in children and non-smoking adults. The report finds a causal relationship between secondhand smoke exposure and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), and declares that the home is becoming the predominant location for exposure of children and adults to secondhand smoke. This report can be accessed at http://www.surgeongeneral.gov/library/secondhandsmoke/
What can you do to decrease exposure to second-hand smoke in your home? Try to kick the cigarette habit. Cigarette smoking is an addiction like using drugs or alcohol. Talk to your health care provider about medications and use the Alaska Tobacco Quit Line at (888) 842-7848. It's free to all Alaska residents. If you want more information on how to quit, you can go to the following sites on-line for information http://www.alaskatca.org/ and http://www.ctri.wisc.edu/ Next, refuse to allow smoking in your home. If this is not possible, try to confine cigarette smoke to one room and use an efficient and properly sized air filter, or open a window and use an exhaust fan.
Health Effects of Indoor Combustion
Health effects of the pollutants released from indoor heating or environmental tobacco smoke are:Carbon monoxide which is a colorless, odorless gas that interferes with the delivery of oxygen throughout the body. At high concentrations, Carbon Monoxide can cause a range of symptoms from headaches, dizziness, weakness, nausea, confusion and disorientation, to fatigue in healthy people and episodes of increased chest pain in people with chronic heart disease. The symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning are sometimes confused with the flu or food poisoning. Fetuses, infants, elderly people and people with anemia or with a history of heart or respiratory disease can be especially sensitive to carbon monoxide exposures.
Nitrogen dioxide a colorless, odorless gas that irritates the mucous membranes in the eye, nose and throat and causes shortness of breath after exposure to high concentrations. There is evidence that high concentrations or continued exposure to low levels of nitrogen dioxide increases the risk of respiratory infection; there is also evidence from animals studies that repeated exposures to elevated nitrogen dioxide levels may lead, or contribute, to the development of lung disease such as emphysema. People at particular risk from exposure to nitrogen dioxide include children and individuals with asthma and other respiratory diseases.
Particle Matter is a pollutant released when fuels are incompletely burned. This can can lodge in the lungs and irritate or damage lung tissue. A number of pollutants, including radon and benzo(a)pyrene, both of which can cause cancer, attach to small particles that are inhaled and then carried deep into the lung.
The Partnership for Clean Indoor Air
The Partnership for Clean Indoor Air was launched at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg to address the increased environmental health risk faced by more than 2 billion people in the developing world who burn traditional biomass fuels indoors for cooking and heating.According to the World Health Organization, the increased exposure to air pollution results in an estimated 1.6 million premature deaths each year, largely among women and children. The mission of the Partnership is to improve health, livelihood and quality of life by reducing exposure to air pollution, primarily among women and children, from household energy use.
The Philips Woodstove: In 2006, Phillips research of the Netherlands announced the end of successful trials of a woodstove for communities currently relying on less efficient means. The stove cuts the smoke and toxic emissions. The Philips woodstove reduces pollution due to smoke up to 90%, and organic volatile emissions up to 99% of the level of traditional fires. It also burns more efficiently to reduce the load on the existing energy supply chain, without involving dependence on non-renewable energy sources. The stove could benefit up to 300 million families in the world’s poorest regions.
