February 23, 2016 · Exit133

Tacoma-area Youth Present Wood Smoke Photovoice: A Citizen-Science Event

TACOMA, WASH. — Ten Pierce County middle and high school students spent part of 2015 and 2016 documenting their neighborhoods with photos and sampling the air quality of their indoor environments as part of a citizen-science project to reveal the impacts of wood smoke and fine particle pollution on public health.

Their work is part of the Wood Smoke Photovoice Environmental Justice Project. Their findings will be presented to the public during a Wood Smoke Photovoice Gallery Event on Tuesday, March 1st, 5:30p-7:30 pm at the Grace Moore Library, 215 S. 56th Street, Tacoma.

This is the first citizen-science research project to investigate wood smoke pollution in homes. The event will also include facilitated community discussion concerning wood smoke pollution and environmental justice. The project is made possible through a grant received by the UW Tacoma Nursing & Healthcare Leadership Program.

Featuring the works of 10 middle and high school students from Tacoma, Lakewood, Fircrest, Spanaway, and Puyallup, the event showcases the photos, stories, and air-sampling data youth collected in their homes during Pierce County’s 2015-2016 burn-ban season, when indoor and outdoor burning were restricted to prevent unhealthy levels of pollution.

Wood smoke is emitted into the air from wood burning stoves, fireplaces, and outdoor bonfires. Fine particle pollution from sources such as wood smoke can have negative effects on human health, including respiratory and cardiac disease. A large area of Pierce County--including Tacoma, Fife, Milton, Lakewood, Puyallup, Spanaway, Frederickson and Steilacoom--has been designated as a smoke reduction zone, where special efforts are being made to reduce wood smoke, which accounts for more than half of fine particle pollution on an average winter day.

The Wood Smoke Photovoice Environmental Justice Project aims to reduce wood smoke and improve public health in Pierce County through community engagement. This stage of the project, starting with a small cohort, is designed to determine the feasibility of engaging and empowering youth to achieve wood smoke reduction goals. 10 youth from Lakewood, Fircrest, Tacoma, Spanaway, and Puyallup took photos around their neighborhoods that depict their perceptions of wood smoke pollution and performed indoor air-sampling tests during burn-bans. Air samples were tested at the UW Tacoma Center for Urban Waters laboratory. The youth met periodically between November and February to share their photos and data and to discuss wood smoke pollution, health effects, local management efforts, and social justice issues.

Their results are surprising: while only one youth reported using a woodstove, all the youth found evidence of the tracer elements of wood smoke particulate pollution, sometimes in high concentrations, in every indoor environment tested. The voices of the youth, coupled with the testing results, will inform future efforts to expand both the Photovoice project and to advocate for expanded state resources to address the sources of wood smoke pollution.

What: Wood Smoke Photovoice Gallery Event

When: Tuesday, March 1, 2016, 5:30 – 7:30 p.m.

Where: Grace Moore Library, 215 S. 56th St., Tacoma, Wash.

Project and Event Contact: Robin Evans-Agnew, PhD, RN, 206-605-1863 or robagnew@uw.edu

6 comments

julie mellum February 23, 2016

This is wonderful that school students are exploring wood smoke pollution--because it's our young people who will be the most harmed by wood smoke over the course of their lifetimes. Wood smoke now seems to be the number one most obvious pollution problem in most cities in the US--and it's not industrial wood burning, but wood burning bonfires right in our own neighborhoods that harm our neighbors at close range.
brian moench February 23, 2016

Below are 18 reasons why wood burning should be banned in all urban areas, from Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment. 1. All air pollution is not created equal. Wood smoke is the most toxic type of pollution in most cities, more dangerous than auto pollution and most industrial pollution. Lighting a wood fire in your house is like starting up your own mini-toxic waste incinerator. 2. Lifetime cancer risk is 12 times greater for wood smoke compared to an equal volume of second hand cigarette smoke. 3. Burning 10 lbs. of wood for one hour, releases as much PAHs (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) as 35,000 packs of cigarettes. 4. Toxic free-radical chemicals in wood smoke are biologically active 40 times longer than the free radicals in cigarette smoke. 5. Wood smoke is the third largest source of dioxins, one of the most intensely toxic compounds known to science. 6. The very small size of wood particles make them seven times more likely to be inhaled than other particulate pollution. 7. Wood smoke easily penetrates homes of neighbors creating concentrations up to 88% as high as outdoor air. 8. If you smell wood smoke, you know you are being harmed. The sweet smell comes from deadly compounds like benzene. Once you can smell the smoke you know the concentration of particulate matter is dangerously high. 9. The most dangerous components of air pollution are much higher inside homes that burn wood than non-burners, as much as 500% higher. The characterization of a wood burning ban “punishing the little people” is easily undermined because a ban would actually benefit the burners themselves more than anyone else, especially their own children 10. Considering the most dangerous part of particulate pollution, wood burning produces as much overall as all our cars during the winter. 11. We require emissions testing of all our cars. Great. An average house heated with wood emits about as much winter time pollution as driving between 90-400 cars all winter, but we don’t emissions test wood stoves. Why not? 12. The inhalable particulate pollution from one woodstove is equivalent to the amount emitted from 3,000 gas furnaces producing the same amount of heat. 13. Emissions from modern combustion appliances for wood logs may increase ten-fold if they are not operated appropriately, and most of them are not. 14. Wood smoke is the only pollution emitted right where people spend most of their time. It disperses poorly, is not evenly distributed and stays in the air longer because of its small size. Concentrations can be 100 times higher for neighbors of wood burners than what is captured at the nearest monitoring station. Real local “pollution victims” are created even when overall community levels are low. 15. If your neighbor is a regular wood burner, and follows all the rules, i.e. doesn’t burn during yellow or red alert days, but does during all “green” days, you can go an entire winter without having one single day of clean air. 16. According to California’s Bay Area Air Quality Management District, burning wood costs the rest of the community, primarily your next door neighbors, at least $2 in extra medical expenses for every lb of wood that you burn. An average fire then costs your neighbors about $40. 17. Long ago most communities passed ordinances protecting people from second hand cigarette smoke. Ironically those laws protect people at places they don't necessarily have to be (restaurants, stores, buildings, etc). But in the one place they have to be, their home, they have no protection from something even worse—wood smoke. People should have just as much protection from wood smoke as from cigarette smoke and for all the same reasons. We don’t allow people to blow cigarette smoke in your face, why should we allow people to blow wood smoke into your home? 18. Wood burning is not even close to carbon neutral over the short term, the next few decades, and it is that time frame that will make or break the climate crisis. Burning wood is extremely in inefficient. Per unit of heat created wood produces even more CO2 than the fossil fuels do. Furthermore, the black carbon particulate matter released enhances the absorption of radiant heat in the atmosphere, making global warming worse, and prematurely melts already imperiled mountain snow pack.
- Vicki Morell CCAA February 23, 2016
  
  Good for you guys. I would love the see what you find. Any ideas on when this will be completed.
  - Dr. Robin Evans-Agnew February 24, 2016
    
    Hi Vicki, Thank you for your interest. The presentation next Tuesday march 1 530pm at the Moore Library will be our final public event. We will be working to get this information out to more policymakers in the city and county over the next few months.
Bill Lewin February 26, 2016

This is fantastic the more information out there the sooner people will understand the harm heating with wood is doing to health and environment. And coming from our youth makes this doubly important . thank you
Patricia Taylor February 29, 2016

It is wonderful these young citizen-scientists are studying the serious health impact of exposures to residential indoor wood smoke! In 2010, Environment and Human Health Inc. (EHHI) measured the indoor air quality of four homes neighboring outdoor wood furnaces. The research was peer-reviewed and published in 2014 in the Journal of Inhalation Toxicology. http://www.ehhi.org/reports/woodsmoke/woodsmoke_report_ehhi_1010.pdf The study showed a house as far away as 850 feet from an outdoor wood furnace had 6 times the levels of PM 2.5 as the houses not near an outdoor wood furnace and 4 times the levels of the EPA air standards. Particles of wood smoke are so small that windows and doors cannot keep smoke out. Wood smoke has many of the same components as cigarette smoke. EHHI has shown that wood smoke from outdoor wood furnaces enters neighboring houses in high enough amounts to cause serious health impacts to these families. States can no longer ignore this science and should ban outdoor wood furnaces until safer technologies are found.