Fay Johnston
I’m sad to say I haven’t got a lot of good news to report on trends in air quality. We’ve been worrying about the issue for a long time. There’ve been various educational campaigns, but here and all around Australia, the trends aren’t really changing.
Leon Compton
So we’ve got much more efficient wood heaters. You can set the choke, you know, the sort of the older ones, they put a screw in basically. So how far down you could set the choke, the newer ones just don’t allow you to burn them as low or potentially as smokely overnight. But beyond that, we’re not really doing much to improve our air quality from our fires.
Fay Johnston
There’s two or three issues there, so I can go through them one by one. One is that the vast majority of the 1.3 million heaters in Australia are older. They weren’t built to the latest standards. So that’s one issue, heaters last forever. The second issue that the latest standards themselves don’t tell you how much pollution goes into the air. They’re very good for comparing heaters. They’re not good at telling us how polluting the wood heater is, and they’re not fit for purpose in protecting health because that’s what we need now. When they were developed, they were developed for a different purpose. The third issue is even the standards we’ve got that aren’t fit for purpose, aren’t enforced. The last audit was 2007. 70 per cent of the heaters audited had mechanical modifications that would have increased compared to what they said they were when they passed the test. What you mentioned moving down the stop, the amount of air you can put in was one of the things that was altered in more than half in this audit, long time ago, but we haven’t done an audit since. So even though we do have standards, how well are those standards being introduced? We just don’t know because we haven’t done it.
Leon Compton
Fay Johnston, what does that then tell us about the quality of the air that we’re breathing this June morning around Tasmania?
Fay Johnston
If you can see it or smell it, then your body is reacting to it and it’s bad for you. All those tiny particles. We breathe 11,000 litres a day, right? So what’s in the air is going to come into us. If our lungs detect an adverse threat, which they do, they will do an immune response. They’ll do a stress response. There’ll be more inflammation. There’ll be more coughing. There’ll be these chemical mediators. Some of the particles will go into our blood. It will also stress our cardiovascular systems. Most of us, if we’re fit and healthy, it’s not going to bother us. But 30 to 40 per cent of us aren’t in that category. So if we’re either old or we’re young or we’ve got a chronic disease, and especially people with asthma or lung disease, it doesn’t take much smoke at all to trigger serious symptoms, a serious event.
Leon Compton
That is fascinating. A fascinating thinking about where we’re up to in Tasmania right now. And so on the other hand, you’ve got the fact that fires are critical for heating a lot of homes and for a lot of our listeners. As power prices continue to rise, as other forms of heating become particularly expensive, a fire is the way to stay warm. Where do you think we’re at then in that balance between the need to stay warm and the wider health of the community?
Fay Johnston
Yeah, that is a crucial point. And a cold house is really bad for your health and sends you to hospital just as much as polluted air. There’s no way we can accept a trade-off where we have cleaner air at the expense of a colder house. That’s just not on. We need to have healthy, warm houses. And there’s lots of ways we can do that. There’s been economic modelling of costs to householders, characterising one as way more expensive than the other isn’t actually right. There’s a lot of economies in using electricity, for example. And the cost of the firewood and the cost to the environment, we can only verify that 10 per cent in Tas actually come from managed plantations. And so what’s the impacts on greenhouse and all these other things? If you’re burning wood and it’s not sourced renewably, you might as well be burning coal. The other thing is winters might be getting warmer. We’re expecting a warmer winter with climate change. That could be a good thing for needing less heating. But it’s also an argument for a good reverse cycle air conditioner and a heat pump, right? Because you will get the cooling from the heat waves that are coming more often and you’ll get really clean heating in winter. So there’s lots of reasons to really think about what you use to heat your home.
Leon Compton
Who is actually responsible for these air audits or wood heater audits?
Fay Johnston
Yeah, so that is a brilliant question. And one of the reasons we’ve had frustratingly slow progress in this area in Australia is that responsibility is fragmented. There’s the federal environment department, there’s the federal health department, there’s state environment and health departments, and there’s local councils. And all of them have different roles in different areas and no one of them has the clear lead. But I believe the audit from 2007 was commissioned by the federal department, environment department.
Leon Compton
A final question, tell me about the research you’re doing at the moment into what low emission wood heaters, what are you learning?
Fay Johnston
So it’s exciting. So since I spoke to you about this last winter, we’ve built and commissioned a wood heater testing laboratory at the University of Tasmania, part of Fire Lab 3 and our bioenergy emissions and flammability labs. So we’re now in a position to really get into the issue of heaters. And there’s two issues with it. You shouldn’t see smoke. Smoke belching from a chimney means something’s wrong, either with the heater or the way it’s being used. It can take a same heater and beautiful dry wood and the amount of smoke that comes out can vary a hundred times purely on how it’s used. Okay, so there’s a huge amount of skill in how you use it. But it can also vary a lot in the way it’s designed and heaters, therefore, because there’s so much variation in the humans, heaters need to be foolproof. They need to be able to be really low emission despite the diversity of humanity that’s going to use them. It’s totally unrealistic to expect all of us with a wood heater to be that skilled because we’re not, and we’re not never going to get there because it’s actually a hard thing to do. So we’re developing a protocol, a means of testing wood heaters that’s fit for purpose for eucalypts. No other country around the world burns hardwoods like we do. So there are protocols from New Zealand for softwoods. We’re developing that for hardwoods so we can have a really stringent test burning under real world conditions with the startup phase, with wet wood, all the things that people will throw at them. And we believe you can get a heater that can handle all that and be comparable to a pellet stove. And if we can achieve that in Australia, then there’ll be a place for them.
Leon Compton
And then it’s about subsidising people perhaps with old emissions technology into making the switch over to a different, more efficient kind of wood heater, which won’t be cheap.
Fay Johnston
Yep. New Zealand, they changed the regulations in Canterbury. Within five years there were 10 or 20 different models on the market. The price is now comparable to a standard wood heater for ultra low emission burner.