Wood smoke...what happens to it?

Oldmainer said:

Hi Guys...what happens to wood smoke after it leaves the chimney?

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It becomes one with the Great Outdoors!

My guess is that the particulate matter eventually mixes with condensing water in the atmosphere and rains/snows back down on us. Cheers!

I was wondering when someone would ask that question

Angels from heaven come down and collect it to fertilize acres and acres of hardwoods so the circle of life and warmth can continue throughout eternity.

Our world is a closed system. Everything we put in the air and water and the ground, stays here. I'm no scientist, and I'm sure the scientific types will chime in.

That's why there are those out there who are very "green" about treading lightly in our world, leaving things as you found them,.........all that.

With direct relationship to wood stoves, I think of those communities that have outlawed the use of wood stoves, because their communities are in a deep valley. They, being surrounded by high mountain ranges, found that smoke (from wood stoves, and factories, and.........) tends to settle over their valley communities, and stagnate the air. (I don't know if that's because of barometric pressure, or because of prevailing winds, but anyway).

Someone in here put up a list in another thread, of the various chemicals found in wood fire smoke, and I was (frankly) amazed at the list. Seemed to me that being a "responsible wood burner" didn't necessarily eliminate all the chemicals on that list, but some. "Responsible" with regard to WHAT we burn.

My company sent me to China (Shanghai) not long ago, and while there, I noted the lack of any evidence of real nutrients in the soil, and the orange color to the air. Taking a breath, my throat would burn. What bothered me most about that (being thankful that I didn't live there), was that, just because they are on the other side of the planet from where "I" live, didn't mean that we here would not be affected. What happens on our planet, happens to the air and water for ALL of us, in some form or another.

The re-burning of the smoke from the wood fire, with a new EPA-rated stove, is supposed to be a help (because of the re-burning of the gases) to some degree, with the smoke we are putting into our neighborhood (and our world neighborhood), but to what degree, I don't know.

-Soupy1957

I believe much of the smoke cools and becomes dust. Thus the reason I stopped burning wood in the garage around the old Camaro. Everything had black dust/soot on it. Now that I am burning indoors, and more effectively, the dust is much less and light gray in color. No scientist here, just an observer.

NH_Wood said:

My guess is that the particulate matter eventually mixes with condensing water in the atmosphere and rains/snows back down on us. Cheers!

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That's a big part of it. It will also settle on objects it touches, or get stuck in the lungs of critters that breathe it- too much and it appears as soot. Coal is worse for this. It will be digested by microbes on soil.

Oldmainer said:

Hi Guys...how was/is it determined... how/why wood smoke is bad for you? And I don't mean by locking some poor freekin' animals in a box and have them breath wood smoke 24/7 either. It may be that wood smoke isn't as bad as the mouth foamers would have you think... Some real life research would be nice to know from the real world....if there is any to be had.

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Sorry, but I think it will be a very long time before you'll see any controlled double-blind scientific studies using human beings as subjects. Until then, you'll have to accept the use of animal models in similar studies, just like the ones used in testing everything from the latest drugs to food additives to cosmetics to everyday chemicals we use in the home.

There has been a lot of research on the individual components of wood smoke (many of them are the same crap you'll find in cigarette smoke), and there are some very nasty players in that mix. Since we don't (yet) perform scientific experiments on humans, the use of mice, rats, rabbits, pigs, and all sorts of lab critters in controlled laboratory settings is the only way to go. In almost every instance, these animals have been shown to exhibit a higher incidence of cancer and other diseases when exposed to these chemicals in high concentrations for short time periods (not much can be done about the fact that mice don't live as long as humans).

In the case of cancer, since the same cancer causing mechanisms are happening at a cellular level in humans, the same increased incidence of cancer is assumed to happen to humans in lower concentrations over longer time periods. This is how we discovered the cancer-causing potential of these same chemicals in tobacco. It's a lot faster than letting people smoke for 40 years and then seeing is there is a higher correlation between cancer and smokers vs. cancer and non-smokers. Which, of course, we now know there is, but correlations don't prove anything. You need to establish mechanisms, and these have been amply demonstrated in countless lab experiments over the last 50 years... whether you trust the results or not.

Google PAHs, furans (dioxin), nitrogen oxides (NOx) to see how harmful these chemicals are to humans. Otherwise, I think you'll have to stick around until we degenerate into a society that is willing to take humans and expose them to wood smoke for years and then wait to see what happens to them. In the meantime, trying to burn as cleanly as possible is not bad advise.

You can use humans for studies based on secondary data. I have read reports on research that claimed chimney sweeps have a much higher rate of lung cancer than chance would predict.

What percentage of chimney sweeps are smokers? And what else did they do for a living that could have contributed to them developing lung cancer? Lots of other variables.

I recently listened to a report on radon levels and it was similar. I forget the number of deaths each year that are blamed on exposure to high radon levels, but of those it was somehow determined that a very large percentage were also smokers.

Anecdotal evidence is useful to be sure, but it's so very hard to draw hard conclusions from it.

Oldmainer said:

Hi Guys...what happens to wood smoke after it leaves the chimney?

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I heard they collect as much as they can and ship it to Washington, DC. There it's mixed with a generous portion of mirrors and becomes Federal Legislation. :-S

Humans have been exposed to wood smoke for centuries, even now in developing countries many people (mainly women) suffer the effects of cooking indoors over simple wood stoves that have no outdoor exhaust chimneys, they are basically cooking over indoor camp fires.
There have been studies done already. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/02/060215090413.htm

The amount of smoke we might get exposed to from our wood stoves is ridiculously low and the amount of smoke that goes into the atmosphere from all the wood stoves in the world is a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of smoke that released into the atmosphere from one typical forest fire, of which there are thousands every year in Canada alone. Probably much the same in the US.
Forest fires in Canada

johnstra said:

What percentage of chimney sweeps are smokers? And what else did they do for a living that could have contributed to them developing lung cancer? Lots of other variables.

I recently listened to a report on radon levels and it was similar. I forget the number of deaths each year that are blamed on exposure to high radon levels, but of those it was somehow determined that a very large percentage were also smokers.

Anecdotal evidence is useful to be sure, but it's so very hard to draw hard conclusions from it.

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Like the correlation between burning unseasoned wood and finding creosote in the chimney? :lol:


That's what I meant about correlations being meaningless all on their own. They are fine to point out possible directions in which to search, but give me a controlled scientific experiment any day to try to find out why there is a correlation in the first place.

I really don't see why so many folks seem to be scienceophobes. I see this resistance with environmental studies, medical studies, even here on Hearth with scientifically controlled wood burning studies. Seems there just has to be something wrong with the scientists or their methods when they come up with something we haven't directly noticed ourselves.

Lest we forget, scientists conceived of and harnessed atomic energy. How well do you think that might have gone by trial and error and direct observation using only our senses? "OK, Steve... you stay here and I'll go over there, then we'll fling these two chunks of uranium together as hard as we can and see what happens."

Scientists discovered all of the chemistry and physics involved in automobile technology, computers, communication devices, medical imaging machines, pharmaceuticals... heck, they even landed men on the moon and discovered it wasn't really made of swiss cheese. Trust these guys a little, they are responsible for almost everything we know and do in our society.

The most common and plentiful elements and compounds are naturally recycled. The carbon cycle, for example, takes the carbon molecules and reuses them over and over - pretty much endlessly. When carbon dioxide comes out of your stove (as part of the smoke) it is taken up by green plants and contributes to the production of oxygen, as everyone knows. Recycling was "invented" by nature - not by us.

-Speak

SpeakEasy said:

The most common and plentiful elements and compounds are naturally recycled. The carbon cycle, for example, takes the carbon molecules and reuses them over and over - pretty much endlessly. When carbon dioxide comes out of your stove (as part of the smoke) it is taken up by green plants and contributes to the production of oxygen, as everyone knows. Recycling was "invented" by nature - not by us.

-Speak

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"We are all star stuff." Carl Sagan

Oldmainer said:

Hi Battenkiller..."trust" like in global warming?

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Damn! Don't tell me that got cancelled? :-/