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Comment by noughtme | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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