Wood burning industry tries to silence clean air campaigns

A major source of harmful pollution

Made popular by lifestyle trends and industry marketing, wood burning has become a significant public health issue in the UK.

Government emissions figures show that about half the UK’s PM_2.5 emissions comes from residential burning. It is estimated that 1 in 10 homes in the UK now have a wood stove.

The BMJ points out that PM_2.5 pollution, including from wood burning, is classified by the World Health Organization as a known carcinogen, and that exposure is linked with “a range of debilitating health conditions.”

Research cited by the chief medical officer for England, Professor Chris Whitty, has shown that even the newest Ecodesign wood stoves emit several hundred times more pollution than an oil or gas-fired boiler.

Legal threats and lobbying

Freedom of Information requests revealed that almost a third of the 50 councils in England with the highest concentration of wood stoves have been threatened with legal action or lobbied by the Stove Industry Association (SIA). Other local authorities have received leaflets from the SIA claiming that wood burning can be good for health.

Eight London boroughs—Croydon, Haringey, Islington, Lewisham, Merton, Richmond, Southwark and Wandsworth—were threatened with legal action in late 2023 over the London Wood Burning Project, a joint public awareness campaign.

A chilling effect

Tom Parkes, the air quality program manager for Camden Council, which leads the London Wood Burning Project, told The BMJ:

It’s had quite a detrimental effect on local authorities’ confidence. There’s a degree of worry about what happens if we are challenged, even if we’re confident that the science backs up what we’re saying.

Brighton and Hove City Council has also faced pressure over their campaign that calls wood burning a “cosy killer.” Data from air quality sensors across Brighton and Hove have showed dramatic increases in harmful particle pollution last winter, with a peak at 10 pm when wood burners are typically in use.

Oxford City Council received an email from the SIA in December 2022 after a similar public health campaign. The SIA requested evidence that wood burning harmed health and claimed that there was “no scientific evidence” for adverse health effects, but it didn’t threaten legal action.

The SIA claimed to The BMJ that they hadn’t wrongly threatened councils and that several factors had been taken out of context.

Three councils—Dudley in the West Midlands, Elmbridge in Surrey, and Rushmoor in Hampshire—were sent a leaflet from the SIA claiming wood burning provides “health and wellbeing benefits.” Dudley also received a video from the SIA rebutting “misconceptions” that wood stoves were harmful. The industry claimed that Ecodesign stoves were the “future of low carbon, low emission, sustainable heating.”

Tactics to undermine public awareness of risks

Commenting toThe BMJ about these findings, Jonathan Blades, head of policy at the charity Asthma + Lung said:

These tactics by the stove industry clearly try to undermine public awareness of those risks, and that means people aren’t able to make informed decisions for their health. That’s a real concern that the councils need to address.

A need for greater awareness

Dr Laura Horsfall of the Institute of Health Informatics stated:

We need clearer and more honest public health messaging. Wood burning is often marketed as natural, cosy, or environmentally friendly. There’s also a need for greater awareness that even Ecodesign stoves are not pollution free.

Dr. Horsfall further pointed out that the Advertising Standards Authority has ruled against the SIA. The advertising regulator found that newer Ecodesign stoves did not, in fact, significantly reduce all relevant greenhouse gas and air pollutant emissions compared to older wood stoves and open fires.

Larissa Lockwood, director of policy and campaigns at Global Action Plan, said:

I’m shocked. I’ve actually never heard of anything like this—industry lobbying public health servants to ignore a serious public health issue and go against medical advice.

An added note: It’s not just councils

We at DSAWSP, however, weren’t as surprised. One of our own board members was himself threatened with legal action by the SIA in 2024. Before joining our board and while still a graduate student, this individual had tweeted screenshots of the SIA’s posts that he’d altered with added fact-based commentary. Soon after, an email arrived from the SIA’s communications manager. If the tweets were removed, he was told, it would “negate the need for the SIA to seek legal advice on the copyright implications.”

The SIA themselves later posted their own altered copies of social media posts from Global Action Plan’s Clean Air Night.

A familiar playbook

In coverage of the investigative piece in The Guardian, Jemima Hartshorn, director of the advocacy group Mums for Lungs stated:

This is straight from the playbook of tobacco.

There is also an editorial in the same issue of The BMJ about the investigation. In it, editor-in-chief Dr Kamran Abbasi states:

The stove industry is minimising harms by promoting the health benefits of their products and threatening legal action to alter or block public health campaigns introduced by local government. It’s a pattern we’ve seen before and continue to see across a range of industries and products. The dilemma for a company is what to do about a product it has heavily invested in, promoted, and is reaping financial benefits from, when evidence becomes clear that the product is harmful.

Evidence of harm should be the canary in the coal mine that forces a re-evaluation of the marketing and promotion of that product. Such industry appraisals, even if they do happen, tend to seek strategies to maintain sales rather than do what’s best for the health of the company’s customers, including by disputing evidence of harm and using lawyers to chill criticism.

There was also an accompanying podcast, which you can listen to below.