Air quality double whammy from domestic firelighters | Hacker News Reader

Air quality double whammy from domestic firelighters

nature.com

58 pointsKaibeezy61 comments

For anyone unfamiliar with the term firelighter, they are talking about fire starters.

Are these that widespread that they are concerning? I thought they were mostly for lazy outdoors people.

I use newspaper with olive oil to start charcoal grills. Never had trouble starting a fireplace, wood stove or camp fire with anything other than tinder.

Fire starter tablets often contain hexamine which I don’t really want close to my food.

Specifically, they're talking about the fire starters which are cellulose soaked in kerosene.

Such fire lighters smell badly of kerosene (plane fuel - you often smell it at airports). I find that once the packet is opened, even if I put it in a plastic container a little smell still leaks out, so I now store them outdoors.

They make turf based fire starters which smell of not much at all, and burn much longer than those awful kerosene ones.

With a bbq chimney I’ve never need to use anything but newspaper to get the coal going.

The idea of a conversation about the most environmentally friendly way of igniting coal is quite amusing.

Charcoal is pyrolized biomass, not fossil fuel, which means it's approximately carbon-neutral. The problems with it are more associated with deforestation.

When burning things not 100% fully you produce carbon black, which has a greater greenhouse effect than if you would release carbon as CO2. Further harvesting wood leads to younger forests, which store less carbon than old growth forests. A better use-case than burning is using it for durable goods like in construction, which binds the carbon for much longer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_carbon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sink#Forests

p.s. I'm not telling anyone to stop doing bbq, just to stop lying to themselves about the negative effects it has

Carbon black, or black carbon? Black carbon only stays in the atmosphere for a few weeks, and while I can't find data on carbon black it presumably falls to earth pretty quickly too, which makes me think you're comparing instantaneous rather than lifetime greenhouse effect.

Still would be better to keep the carbon solid than released into the atmosphere, no?

Only way that realistically happens is if you bury it deep underground. Charcoal above the surface is part of the carbon cycle.

Charcoal is resistant to the natural decomposition that normally turns wood back into CO2. Therefore if you char wood then bury that charcoal, you don't need to go deep underground to sequester the carbon. Burying charcoal in the topsoil can sequester that carbon for thousands of years or more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrogenic_carbon_capture_and_s...

In that case you would not need to produce charcoal in the first place

Deforestation and release of its bound carbon which will take decades for trees to recapture, manufacturing and transport, impure combustion (which may also include non-carbon pollutants), yadda yadda...

How does that become approximately carbon neutral? And that's before we look at the safety datasheets shared in the thread that indicate 15-40% anthracite/black coal as ingredient in (some?) charcoal briquettes.

Isn't there some sort of energy input in process? I wonder where that usually comes from in industrial production.

Conventional consumer-grade charcoal briquettes used for backyard BBQ typically have some amount of coal in them.

No regular brand of charcoal contains coal. Please link just one brand that does and I’ll withdraw my complaint but I’ve worked in the industry and very much doubt this.

Linked just above:

https://www.thecloroxcompany.com/wp-content/uploads/kingsfor...

That’s from a major brand.

I was surprised to learn this. But I’ve always been suspicious of charcoal briquettes — lump charcoal is much nicer. (And one should IMO always use a chimney starter or similar device in order to get them properly lit as quickly as possible and with as little other junk added and hopefully as little emissions as possible.)

"Charcoal" literally means "coal made by charring [implicitly: wood]". I assume you (and probably rootusrootus) mean "No regular brand of charcoal contains [fossil] coal." (eg, lignite, bitumite, or anthracite).

(I don't know what they're on about either; presumably for sufficiently historical values of "conventional" barbecue coal was supplied from the same mines as train / steam engine / home heating coal, but that isn't much of a thing anymore.)

Anthracite coal, 15-40%

https://www.thecloroxcompany.com/wp-content/uploads/kingsfor...

You're being downvoted, but another comment in this thread proves you're right:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37373903

I'm as surprised as anyone. I had no idea.

Anyone using briquettes should switch to lump charcoal.

Do you have a source for that?

Sure. Anthracite coal, 15-40%.

https://www.thecloroxcompany.com/wp-content/uploads/kingsfor...

Charcoal and coal are quite different.

At the same time, the most common form of 'charcoal' that an average person will use in their BBQ is made from both charcoal and coal, as well as other things.

You’ve repeated this a few times, but I clicked on several charcoal options on Home Depot’s website, and they claimed to be made entirely of “100% natural hardwood”. Maybe some cheaper ones have added coal?

Take Kingsford, for example, probably the single most popular brand of briquettes at Home Depot. It does not say 100% natural hardwood, it says 100% natural ingredients, including wood. Coal is natural. And 15-40% of Kingsford briquettes [0].

[0] https://www.thecloroxcompany.com/wp-content/uploads/kingsfor...

standard charcoal briquettes contain coal?

i’m amazed to hear that.

(I use lump charcoal myself which seems to give to food a better smoke flavor)

They do often contain coal. Briquettes are weird. For smoking, you really want to be using wood (or charcoal and wood); charcoal has most of the volatiles burned off already, in principle leaving behind only carbon, so it isn't great for smoking things.

No regular brand of charcoal contains coal.

Please link just one brand that does and I’ll withdraw my complaint but I’ve worked in the industry and very much doubt this.

> "Kingsford Charcoal is made from charred soft and hardwoods such as pine, spruce, hickory, oak and others depending on which regional manufacturing plant it comes from. That char is then mixed with ground coal and other ingredients to make a charcoal briquette. As of January 2016, Kingsford Charcoal contains the following ingredients:[7][8]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsford_%28charcoal%29#Manuf...

If this isn't true, they need to fire their entire PR team.

This MDS says it contains anthracite: https://www.thecloroxcompany.com/wp-content/uploads/kingsfor...

Wow. Son of a gun you're right. Here's more info on why coal dust turns out to make an ideal binder for charcoal briquettes:

https://mineralmilling.com/coal-dust-a-superior-choice-as-a-...

I had no idea. Key quote:

"Research and patent literature show that when charcoal briquettes are produced using an organic binder such as anthracite, the binder is present in quantities of between approximately 2 and 8% by weight."

And "coal, anthracite" is clearly listed as the third most common ingredient in the safety sheet for Kingsford Charcoal Briquettes, after charcoal and ashes.

i should clarify i’m not smoking the meats, i’m just grilling. But I can definitely taste the difference between charcoal and briquettes.

I guess for real smoking i’ll have to find wood.

> I can definitely taste the difference between charcoal and briquettes

Yes I agree. I either use lump charcoal, or hardwood that I let burn down to embers. Briquettes impart an unpleasant flavor.

As a kid I would set the charcoal chimney above a box fan after getting it started a bit. You’d get a pillar of fire coming out the top in no time at all.

Nowadays I am lucky to have just enough room in my apartment for a folding bbq, but every time I have to use those starters I think about how much more fun that chimney was.

When you try a bit of kerosene you never go back...

Just a cup-full poured into the base of any fire turns it into a roaring inferno within 10 seconds or so, and by getting hotter quicker you typically avoid lots of smoke that you'd normally get while starting a fire with newspaper - especially important if you're having a fire near other people who won't want stinky smoke blowing across their gardens on a nice sunny day.

> other people who won't want stinky smoke blowing across their gardens on a nice sunny day.

Bystanders aren't thrilled about the burning kerosene smell -- frankly, it's a lot worse than charcoal.

At airports we call the smell of burning kerosene "the sweet smell of success."

I find the smell of kerosene seems to only happen between opening the kerosene container and lighting it. As soon as it's lit, kerosene smoke at fire-pit scale seems to be odorless.

Then maybe you're not standing downwind.

It absolutely stinks and sometimes for as long as twenty minutes depending on how much was used.

I'm not a chemist and I have no idea what's responsible for the odor. If it's some kind of intermediate byproduct.

I don’t want that in my food

Reading this was a little frustrating, as it appears to be written by authors who have never operated a wood-burning stove, and don't have a great grasp of how fire works.

"In this study, we present air quality and climate effects of previously unrecognized aerosol source, i.e., kerosene-based firelighters that emit more BC than all biomass fuels put together."

Black carbon is formed by incomplete combustion. When temperatures are low, and/or fuel is wet, of course there won't be complete combustion. Of course if you light just a firelighter it's going to throw off a lot of black smoke. Every fire does this when you first start it, because temperatures are low. Same goes with crude oil and coal. Fuels burn poorly and give off a lot of smoke without optimal burning conditions. This should be obvious.

Firestarters work well as firestarters precisely because they are able to start and burn at very low temperatures. The way that they do this is by emitting a large quantity of organic aerosols and black carbon particles at very low temperatures. In a cold environment, the mixture won't have enough heat to fully combust.

If the authors tried throwing a firestarter into a hot fire, they would have seen that it burns relatively cleanly, just like coal and oil would.

Then the authors burn peat, which has an unbelievably high surface area, and think that it burns more cleanly. And of course the tests were done by igniting a cold sample, so that it would be a "controlled test", instead of a bomb calorimeter style test.

What the authors are doing is reminiscent of using calories measured using a bomb calorimeter to measure how much energy the human body gets. It's garbage science that sounds plausible and has lots of pretty charts, but doesn't hold up to cursory inspection.

Kerosene paraffin contributing 50% of the carbon from a wood fire in the first 15 minutes. Roughly. I only really use them to light the barbie a few times per summer… to cook meat. So a triple whammy, I guess.

It's obvious that those firelighters make a lot of carbon particulates.

Just burning one and looking at the flame, thick black smoke comes off it.

I suspect the cellulose is the cause, rather than the kerosene. Perhaps the problem is that the kerosene burns at a lower temperature than the cellulose, and liquid kerosene can act as a decent heatsink via the specific heat of vaporization, therefore preventing the cellulose getting hot enough to properly burn.

Incidentally, common plastics (PE, PP) burn much more cleanly than these firelighters, and also charcoal. I've read about others using waste packaging made of these materials to light charcoal fires. (Don't use PS, PC, or anything chlorinated like PVC --- the emissions from burning those are far more toxic.)

It seems that using biomass in small scale is quite complicated. At least if other than CO2 emissions are considered.

You can't have either too wet or too dry fuel. You need right amount of air and right temperature. And then you even need to consider things like how the fire is started.

It’s not, almost every developing country has figured out how to make charcoal.

Have they figured out how to burn that charcoal with minimal particle emissions? Every time some is burned?

TLDR: kerosene is really terrible for global warming. If "fire starter" logs are this much of a problem, imagine how much global warming is caused by "smudge pots" - sooty, horrifically polluting burners that citrus farmers burn kerosene, used motor oil, hydraulic fluid, etc. in to try and keep their fruit from freezing during a cold snap.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smudge_pot

We really, really need to stop giving agriculture a pass on emissions.

> We really, really need to stop giving agriculture a pass on emissions.

Not just emissions, other externalities as well. It's madness to grow alfalfa in California, only to ship it to Saudi-Arabia for cattle feed. Or for Amazon rainforest to be burned down to grow soybeans that are used to feed cattle on fields that were priorly used for soybeans and then ship the meat to the US and Europe.

The problem is that consumers want fresh <everything> 24/7/365, and it would use up enormous amounts of political capital to get that under control.

Honestly in the California case, the problem is much more about senior water rights than it is about capitalism or freshness demands.

Of course the problem is capitalism, to be precise: the lack of a mandate to price in externalities - not just water rights, but also CO2 and other pollution, destruction of extremely large swaths of land or devastation of biodiversity by ever larger monoculture farms - into the actual sticker price of products.

Something like the alfalfa or Brazilian meat trade should be exorbitantly expensive, as should be stuff like strawberries from Morocco or cut flowers from Kenya to Europe. The emissions associated with these products are absurdly large, and yet it's cheap enough to be worthwile.

Again, none of that applies in the California alfalfa case. Senior water rights are a rent. The externalities aren’t important because if they paid a fair market value for that water, it wouldn’t be profitable to grow. Capitalism is unnecessary here; a feudal lord with the same fief on water rights would do the same, capital investment is irrelevant. The trade happens because the government granted a rent, effectively paying to make Imperial Valley farming profitable.

Look, I believe in late-stage capitalism as much as the average liberal arts professor, but it’s stupid to blame all problems on it.

Capitalism actually fixes that, Brazilian beef and argentina and paraguay for that matter too are extraordinarily cheap because tariffs make them expensive in the US / EU.

Luckily we like beef so we eat it all ourselves.

You get moral superiority we get cheap high quality meat, everyone wins.

I don't think there's much demand for South American meat here in Denmark, but vegetables and especially fruit from Africa and South America is easily affordable and available when it's not in season in Europe.

Capitalism has failed to take account of the environmental cost.

Fruits and veg are generally twice the price in the EU, stuff that is grown largely or only here is more like 4x the price in the EU. Coffee, avocados, etc.

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

These prices are a little high too, if you drive to Clorinda in Argentina (15 - 20 mins), it's about half the price.

EU Cattle farmers disagree with you, without tariffs your ranches would be crushed, or more politely made redundant. It's pretty expensive,

https://www.dw.com/en/what-does-eu-mercosur-trade-deal-mean-...

"This would have a very negative effect on the price our producers receive, and this would discourage farmers from taking over farms," said Benoit Cassart, secretary-general of the Belgian Cattle Trade Federation.

"Premium, high-quality meat holds great value in Europe. That's not the case in China, for example. We are hopeful that the European market will open up to Brazilian meat with the finalization of the agreement," Marina told DW.

"That doesn't mean they are producing something bad. But if they must remove the Amazon rainforests to produce meat and send it to Europe, and this makes our green pasture redundant, it makes no sense at all," he told DW.

My point is Europe produces its own high-quality meat, at a price we can afford. It's not consumers pushing for this trade deal, it's the wealthy capital-owners who stand to make a large profit at the expense of the environment.

Food etc. being 2x to 4x more expensive here isn't a problem. You see from the last section of your table that salaries are 900% higher too.

From the description of that article you linked:

This one has been recently lit off, as the exhaust on a fully hot pot becomes almost invisible with a mere hint of red/orange flame.

They're normally not that sooty.

And then what should we put on our tables? And at what cost?

Bugs, they will be supplied with your pod. Your pod likely won’t have a table.

You will eat the bugs and live in the pods.

... and water usage.

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