UK wood stove industry lobbyists have threatened councils with legal action over public information campaigns warning of the harms of air pollution.
At least eight councils have received legal threats, according to an investigation by the British Medical Journal (BMJ). The Stove Industry Association (SIA), which represents the UK’s expanding industry around wood burning in domestic settings, wrote to councils in all London boroughs in late 2023 complaining that leaflets saying wood stoves were “sloppy, not cozy” breached UK advertising codes.
The BMJ, which sent Freedom of Information Act requests to the 50 councils with the highest concentration of wood burners, also found that two other councils had been criticised. Oxford City Council received a complaint from the SIA in December 2022 about a public health campaign, but that approach stopped short of legal threats. Brighton and Hove was the subject of a complaint by Hove Wood Burners to the Advertising Standards Authority.
The SIA lobbied seven other councils on wood burning, with some materials including claims that burning wood, which produces carcinogenic by-products that harm human health, provided “health and wellbeing benefits”, including lowering blood pressure.
Jemima Hartshorn, founder and director of the lobby group Mums for Lungs, said she was shocked by the findings of the investigation. “This comes straight from the tobacco playbook,” he told The Guardian.
“The evidence couldn’t be clearer: burning in your home increases toxic air pollution for you and your neighbours. From heart and lung problems to cancer and dementia, more than 700 diseases are now linked to air pollution, and non-essential wood burning is a huge contributor to toxic particle pollution. And now we read that the industry body is downplaying health evidence to prevent public bodies from informing the public about health dangers. This must stop. And I hope the government will finally wake up and put an end to it Our health comes first – ensuring everyone stays warm in their homes without contaminating themselves or their neighbors.”
An SIA spokesperson said: “The SIA has never sought to prevent councils from improving air quality or carrying out public health campaigns. Our correspondence with local authorities aimed to ensure that their marketing campaigns were proportionate, contained a balanced view and, most importantly, clearly distinguished between open fires, older appliances and modern stoves that comply with eco-design.”
However, eco-friendly stoves have also been associated with serious public health risks, producing large amounts of PM2.5 particles, small soot particles that have been associated with a wide range of human diseases, from miscarriages to dementia, heart disease and respiratory problems. Although they have lower PM2.5 emissions than open fires, they still produce emissions approximately 450 times those of gas boilers. Recent research found that burning wood is associated with 2,500 deaths a year in the UK.
The SIA itself has been found in breach of advertising codes, with the ASA ruling last November that adverts claiming the stoves had “very low emissions” were misleading.
Domestic burning has become one of the largest sources of air pollution in the UK, contributing to approximately 20% of fine particulate matter emissions.
Around one in 10 UK homes now have a wood-burning stove, after years of combustion promotion by interior designers and fashion brands. Although some are installed in homes in rural areas where other forms of heating are less available and where harm to neighbors is less, an increasing number are found in densely populated urban environments, where they are often a complement to existing gas boilers.
The government is carrying out a consultation on wood stoves, but health campaigners have criticized the exercise for omitting any options to ban or restrict the use of wood stoves in urban settings. Instead, the consultation suggests that new stoves should be of a lower-emission variety and could carry health warnings.
Campaigners compared this to advising smokers to adopt low-tar cigarettes, which is a marginal improvement but still exposes users to high health risks. The consultation ends on March 19.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said: “Dirty air deprives people of their health and costs our NHS millions each year to treat lung diseases and asthma. We are consulting on taking action to reduce emissions from domestic burning and their impact on the health of households and their neighbours. By limiting emissions levels and introducing new labels as outlined in our consultation, families will be able to make better, healthier choices when it comes to heating their homes.”
