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Comment by dmos62 | Hacker News Reader

Warsaw is top 15, Krakow and Warsaw are the only European cities in the top 15. For some added context, it's around -10 degrees celcius there right now. I don't know why Poland stands out here, but I know that older residential areas burn wood (in other Eastern European countries as well), because that's just how you heat an old house: these neigbourhoods are horrible to walk through in winter, because the air just stinks of smoke.

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Burning coal and wood wouldn't be that bad. Unfortunately its quite common that people burn their trash

Not sure what your gauge for bad is, but low-temperature burning of coal and wood, which is what you get with cheap wood heaters, produces smoke that is definitely polluting and unhealthy. You can get a wood burner that re-burns well and is very efficient and burns the smoke so completely that you mostly get CO2 and water vapor coming out of the chimney, but they're expensive.

Care to share more about trash burning? I'd be surprised if people living in Krakow or Warsaw commonly burn trash.

It's people from surrounding areas who are experiencing energy poverty. City buildings typically have either central heating or gas furnaces.

A common sight in my area at this time of the year is a senior person driving up to a community dumpster in an equally old car with plates indicating not being from around here and looking for loose pieces of wood - typically furniture.

The sale of furnaces that would even fit something like this for burning was banned in IIRC 2018, but there's a backlog of still functioning ones that are used.

Anyone trying this in a city would have the authorities called on them, but deep in rural areas few care.

I was travelling a lot a couple of days ago across the countryside just outside of Krakow, and people are definitely burning plastics and trash, you can smell it even inside your car in the early hours of the morning.

It's coming from the surrounding areas, not the city itself.

Also one thing to note is that if pollution is bad in general then nearby fires and local sources of pollution will be much more noticeable. At least in my experience it seems to keep the pollution closer to the ground. Like if you are walking around a city with a lot of traffic on a day with bad pollution you will basically smell car exhaust all day whereas on days with low pollution even with the exact same amount of cars it will be much less noticeable.

A bit sad to hear, I expected Krakow suburbs to be better off.

Suburbs may be fine, but beyond them there's a ring of small towns and villages, and I bet most of the pollution is flowing from them down into the city.

Since 2019 people living in Krakow do not burn any solids for heating, because the city introduced total ban on solid fuels including coal and wood an the ban is quite effective.

But people around the city and, frankly, in most of Poland still burn solid fuels and if you drive around these places the smell can be really terrible and the smoke color and density coming from some chimneys definitely doesn't look like a dry wood smoke. Such smoke is often a product of burning very low quality, super fine-grained coal or rather coal dust, which is the cheapest fuel available.

Btw, you can burn plastic just fine in a proper industrial incinerator.

The traditional Polish categories of sorting rubbish is „to the burner” and „to the forest”, optionally „to be burned during the day” and „to be burned during the night”.

Fyi a lot of the unrecyclable waste is burned in other countries too (like most plastic types) but it's done in special facilities with proper filters installed

They burn all kind of shit in very inefficient stoves, modern wood burning stoves are pretty clean

If the somehow-trendy wood-burning stove a friend has recently had installed in the UK is anything to go by — and it was expensive — then "pretty clean" is relative. The air stinks outside his house, and the air stinks inside his house. I don't understand the appeal at all.

I was shocked on a recent trip to England where there was the smell of wood smoke in suburbia.

Fancy is subjective, but I wouldn't call a burner whose air is fed from the inside fancy. Even if you have a good chimney, but your burner interfaces with the inside air, presuming the house is relatively air-tight (built in the last 15 years), you'll get smoke inside when you use it, especially while the chimney is cold, because there won't be enough draft to pull the smoke out of the house. Where I am it is forbidden to have such burners in a new construction.

> I don't understand the appeal at all.

Renewable energy, one of the cheapest source of heat kwh/$, doesn't require electricity to function, cheap to buy/install if the place was designed for it, &c. I'm building right now and my main heater will be a wood stove.

If the air stinks both inside and outside of his house I would assume he's doing something wrong, even my cheap cottage fireplace insert from the 80s doesn't smoke the inside of my house.

Poorly dried wood?

We just installed a second woodburningstove in our house, https://www.contura.eu/en-gb .. and i mean you can mess up your fire by burning wet wood etc. or... paper i dunno.

But dried wood burns really clean, absolutely no smell INSIDE the house (wtf?!) and outside you see a thin whisp of smoke from the chimney.

I wonder how expensive it would be to get widespread usage of better stoves, heat pumps or co-generation + district heating with centralized gasified burning. Everything could be locally built.

I don't know about electricity prices there either.

Gas for heating is something every European nation should steer clear from, for strategic reasons.

> I wonder how expensive it would be to get widespread usage of better stoves, heat pumps or co-generation + district heating with centralized gasified burning. Everything could be locally built.

Do you want cheap and efficient, or do you want locally built?

Very expensive. If you want to invest, first step would be making inefficient houses efficient, aka insulation. Problem is that, a lot of older housing ventilation is built on it being leaky...

The city of Szeged in Hungary did this recently. You can find some numbers from there.

Ukraine is part of Europe but not European Union

I know, haha. I rechecked the ranking: it updated. Now Warsaw is top 12 and Kyiv is top 13.

On top of that Krakow is in a valley, so the air just hangs around.

On top of the trash burning, there's also the fact that Krakow is in a valley so all that pollution just stays in (probably for the better /s)

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