Importance of clean biomass combustion for the air quality in residential areas

Wood as renewable and worldwide available fuel is used for residential heating. This wood combustion can cause very high emissions of inhalable particles resulting in short and long-term health effects. The target of this study was to justify the importance of using clean biomass combustion technologies for controlling wood smoke emissions. Emission samples were collected from a manually fed wood stove, which is normally used in residential villages and a modern log wood boiler. It was found that the particle, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and flue gas emissions were much higher in the manually fed stove than in the modern log wood boiler. This is due to complete combustion in modern log wood boilers and incomplete combustion in manually fed stoves. In parallel particle-phase PM₁₀ samples were collected at a residential site Dettenhausen near Stuttgart during winter 2005/06 and winter 2009. Significant amounts of ambient PAHs were found in the residential site, where 44% of total PAHs have carcinogenic potential. This underlines the importance of good wood combustion technologies to improve air quality in residential areas.