How green is this fuel?
by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
Wood pellets and the burning of same in the appropriate stoves and furnaces is being advocated and advertised as a green way of heating.
While using wood for heating is as old as the use of fire by humans itself, and is, indeed, carbon neutral, if one does not consider the carbon emissions in felling, chopping and transportation, wood pellets are far from green.
First of they are made from virgin wood which could be used for other purposes; purposes where the CO2 would actually remain locked in the wood and, secondly, a great deal of energy in the form of heat and pressure is required to turn the “sawdust” by means of the wood's natural lignite into the pellets.
Having actually inquired from the makers of the pellets as to whether they are using waste wood or sawdust from sawmills the answer was that they don't and that all the wood for the making of the pellets comes from virgin wood and, as far as I am concerned, that is a waste.
Thus, my recommendation for a boiler, stove, or furnace, would be one that either uses solid wood or one that uses wood chips, in preference to wood pellets.
Wood chips from the wood chip burning boilers, stoves and furnaces can be and is being made from waste wood by running that materials, such as broken pallets, etc., through large chippers.
It took the British government a multi-million Pound study to “discover, as they stated in a press release, that waste wood can be burned and I cannot see as to why, therefore, the wood pellets for stove use cannot be made from waste wood. Except that it may be that old wood no longer contains enough of the lignite to bind the sawdust into pellets.
While everyone seems to be wanting to sell the world pellet stoves and furnaces maybe we should all take a much closer look at real stoves and those furnaces that make effective use of the lives of wood chips, especially of the latter as predominately made from waste wood that otherwise would end up in landfill. And in the UK alone well over ten million tonnes of waste building lumber ends up just there.
© 2011
