It’s hard to find a more aesthetically pleasing or more affordable way to warm a home in the winter than using a wood-burning stove, but they’re a big source of Vancouver’s air pollution and a big reason why the city has come close to violating federal air quality standards.
“We think we do have a wintertime air pollution issue,” said Randy Peltier, the operations manager for the Southwest Clean Air Agency, which serves Clark, Cowlitz, Lewis, Skamania and Wahkiakum counties.
One of the biggest sources for pollution in Vancouver and Clark County at large is wood stoves, Peltier said. The air quality is the worst when the temperatures are low and the air is stagnant. In those conditions, pollution lingers close to the ground rather than moving on. Indeed, when the agency sampled the city’s wintertime air a couple years ago, they found 48 to 52 percent of the pollution was from burnt wood.
“That was not all that surprising to us,” Peltier said. “On a bad wood smoke day, the filter smelled like a wood stove.”
The federal clean air standard for fine particulate matter is 35 micrograms per cubic meter over 24 hours. Under the state’s Clean Air Act, communities “at risk” of not meeting air quality standards can set burn bans at a lower threshold than other communities. Vancouver isn’t one of them, but that may be only by virtue of outdated standards.
When the Legislature updated the state’s Clean Air Act in 2012, it defined at risk communities as having average air pollution levels above 29 micrograms per cubic meter based on the years 2008-10. For that period, Vancouver had an average of 27.4.
“Unless somebody introduces a bill to make that at-risk definition based on some other years — the most recent three years, for example — we will never meet that definition,” Peltier said. “Since (2008-10) we’ve been over 30 (micrograms per cubic meter) in some years.”
In the past, the Agency has funded several wood stove replacement programs within the Vancouver Urban Growth Area, giving as much as $1,500 to people to change heat sources. They’re about to begin another one that will go until June 30, 2017, or when they run out of funds.
If people have to use wood stoves, the Southwest Clean Air Agency advocates for them to burn wood as hot and efficiently as possible, preferably in a certified stove. But when things are bad enough, the agency issues burn bans until the conditions improve. The most recent one was from Jan. 8 to Jan. 10.
