The UK government already mandates plain packaging and grisly health warnings on cigarettes, and now the same is coming to home stoves and even sacks of ‘coal’ and firewood.
New wood-burning stoves, bags of firewood, and even sacks of ‘smokeless fuel’ — a coal replacement now sold as the government has already totally outlawed the sale of real coal — will have to be sold with cigarette-style health warnings, the government has said. Appliances will be rated from A to C depending on their efficiency, with many presently available burners and furnaces becoming illegal to buy as the maximum smoke output is to be slashed by 80 per cent.
The Times reports that messages printed on the packaging of burners and fuel will include the warning that “this appliance emits air pollution into and around your home, which can harm your health”, and that it has a “negative impact on the health of you and your family”.
The government claims wood smoke can be linked to the deaths of 2,500 people a year. Health warnings and even plain, unbranded packaging for cigarettes and other tobacco products are now the rule in the UK, introduced on similar grounds.
Despite the draconian new measures intended to clamp down on homes heated by traditional means, campaigners say the rules don’t go far enough and that Westminster should ban log burners altogether, something the government has reportedly been considering for years. The debate has occasionally taken on something of the appearance of a class war, the latest assault against rural Britons by a distinctly urban-dominated government that neither understands nor sympathises with its fellow countrymen.
Energy prices have soared in the United Kingdom over the course of the past 20 years, with both gas and electricity prices at historic highs as global prices rise and the government pursues an aggressive decarbonisation policy, sacrificing traditional forms for wind and solar. The energy prices Britons pay are some of the highest in the world, so perhaps it is unsurprising that some have attempted to wrestle back some control from centrally fixed pricing and generation policies, and the number of homes known to be burning wood and installing new log-burning stoves has increased.
Burning wood at home, even as a backup, may also offer a lifeline to households in the case of the government-controlled central electricity supply failing, particularly in winter when the national grid is most vulnerable. But this is a threat to the UK’s push for net zero and green energy, and in addition to simple warning labels, the UK is also moving to increase fines for dissenters. The fine for those selling damp wood for burning — wood that hasn’t been dried before burning being reckoned to release more particulates as it combusts less efficiently — has risen from £300 to £2,000, reports The Independent.
Even off-grid homes that burn wood they cut themselves and don’t let season for long enough face a £1,000 fine.
This push saw householders even buying coal to burn at home banned in 2021. Sale of “unauthorised coal” to a domestic customer invites a £300 fixed penalty, and higher fines if the courts get involved, and fuel sellers were warned that “enforcement officers will check” their records to ascertain what is being sold to whom. “Smokeless” coal alternatives like anthracite remain legal, for now.
The British government has also banned the mining of coal as part of the “clean energy future”.
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