p. 18 CHANIA POST Your local free paper
Emergency measures unveiled to combat smog over Greek cities What to burn in your fireplace The government’s decisions to deal with extreme air pollution due to alternative heating sources used in Greek homes that cannot afford heating oil or natural gas bills were published in the Government Gaby Petros Chatzistavros zette, making them officially appliCivil Engineer (T.E.) cable. The Greece-wide measures were decided at an emergency meeting by the Ministers of Finance (Yannis Stournaras), Health (Adonis Georgiadis) and Environment, Energy and Climate Change (Yiannis Maniatis), who announced that the provision of free electricity to families in need by the Public Power Corporation (PPC) would be extended to more days and appealed to more Greeks to apply for subsidised heating, to avoid burning improper substances at fireplaces and wood-burning stoves. According to the decisions, warnings will also be issued for specific days where suspended particulates are very high to stop using the alternative heating sources in cities throughout Greece, to suspend use of central heating in public buildings and to restrict vehicle circulation. The standard pollution rate to be used will a maximum of 150 mg per cubic metre of air, above which emergency measures will be announced at all cities in Greece. Exceptions will include health centres and hospitals, psychiatric wards, centres for people with special needs or chronic illnesses, retirement homes, orphanages, nursery schools, and primary and secondary schools. Industrial plants and production units will be asked to reduce their activities by 30 percent on high-pollution days; exceptions are granted to plants that use continuously-burning furnaces or units running on natural gas. Private cars without a catalytic converter and all vehi-
cles, private or commercial, running on diesel will also be banned from circulating on days warnings are issued. This measure includes school buses and public-use trucks in urban areas, while taxis will go under the alternating-day circulation plan, depending on odd- or even-numbered plates. The right to impose the measures when necessary falls to the Environment, Energy and Climatic Change minister for the region of Attica and to regional district directors for the rest of Greece. In addition to other measures, cheaper power will be provided to organisations providing social services such as private non-profit organisations, church agencies providing free meals, public legal entitities supervised by the ministry of Labour which take care of social needs at local government level (such as social pantries, medical centres and free meals). All categories will be given a 70-percent cut on electricity rates by the PPC. What to burn in your fireplace Fire logs, coffee grounds, corn pellets, wood pellets, or wood? What’s the greenest wood for your fireplace? The weather outside is frightful and you’d like nothing better than to curl up in front of the fire with a good ancient-forest friendly book and a mug of fair trade organic cocoa. But you won’t be able to settle until you know your fire is the most earth-friendly it could be. What exactly should you burn in the ol’ fireplace for the cleanest, most efficient flame with the lowest greenhouse gases emissions?
What kind of hearth do you have? For starters, you need to assess what you can burn in your fireplace, since you can’t just toss a handful of corn onto the andirons and expect a toasty blaze. Wood pellets and corn pellets can only be burned in pellet stoves that are specially designed to slowly feed the pellets into the flames. If you already have an airtight woodstove or insert, you have little choice but to burn natural wood, trust the age old rule: the drier, the better. Most firelogs are not recommended for burning in airtight woodstoves or fireplace inserts -- unless you leave the doors open, which would significantly decrease the efficiency of your stove. If you have a regular decorative fireplace with no insert, you do have a choice to make: natural wood or firelogs? But which are the greenest? (If you haven’t chosen your fireplace, check out our article Wood, gas or electric) The uncomfortable truth: old fashioned decorative fireplaces are not green, since they send most of their heat straight up the chimney. The best thing to do with such a fireplace is to add a modern insert, an addition that will increase the fireplace’s heating efficiency from near-zero to the 70-85 percent range. But if that’s not in the cards this winter, here are some tips to help you choose a suitable fuel to burn: Smoke gets in your eyes Natural wood is considered a carbon neutral fuel, since burning it only releases the amount of CO2 that the tree sequestered in its lifetime. It’s not necessarily the wood that is the problem, it’s the smoke. Burning wood badly (using wet wood or letting a fire smoulder) can release excess methane, a gas that has a greenhouse impact 20 times greater than that of CO2. What’s more, burning wood in an open fireplace releases