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Love affair with fireplace cools with health concerns

The apartment which is, in fact, being considered for an issue of Elle Decor has maple floors, casement windows and all the character one would expect to find in a building that was once a factory.

But one of the features that many people in the city would pay a premium for is something the owners don like: the fireplace.

wood burning fire in the city is a ridiculous luxury we would never have put it in ourselves, said Arpels, grandson of one of the founders of Van Cleef Arpels and the former managing partner of Netto Collection, a baby furniture company bought by Maclaren. the city, it doesn make sense to burn fires, because it inefficient and it polluting. Among those who aspire to be environmentally responsible, it is joining the ranks of bottled water and big houses.

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smoke from a fire smells very nice, said Diane Bailey, a senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council in San Francisco. it can cause a lot of harm. The tiny particles, she said, cause inflammation and illness, and can cross into the bloodstream, triggering heart attacks as well as worsening other conditions.

Or as Starre Vartan, a 33 year old blogger who goes by the name Eco Chick, put it: time you are burning wood or cow dung, you be creating pollution. It like junk food: If you do it once a month, then who cares? But if it something you do every day, it important that you mitigate it somehow. It a hazard. surprisingly, the green community has been sounding the alarm for some time.

Wood smoke contains some of the same particulates as cigarette smoke, said Dr. Norman H. Edelman, the chief medical officer for the American Lung Association, as well as known carcinogens like aldehydes; it has also been linked to respiratory problems in young children. now know from lots of studies that wood smoke is very, very irritating, Edelman said. contains a lot of irritating gases and it also contains damaging particulate matter. It probably not good for anybody, and it especially bad for anybody who has a chronic respiratory problem. So the association strongly advises people not to use the traditional fireplace, he said.

Certainly, there are many who consider this eco overkill. After all, in Greek mythology, fire was a gift from the divine, stolen from Zeus by Prometheus and handed over to shivering humanity. What could be more natural than sitting around a crackling fire on a winter night, at a campsite in the Berkshires or in a Brooklyn brownstone?

But growing concerns about the air pollution and health problems caused by smoke from wood burning fires are prompting a number of areas across the country to pass laws regulating them,van cleef arpels alhambra copy necklace.

lot of municipalities are taking action, said Bailey, adding that the weather based measures called burn bans are perhaps the most widespread restriction. These measures can be mandatory or voluntary,van cleef alhambra replica necklace, and can become more restrictive as air quality declines.

So far, most of the wood burning regulations tend to be out West. A few examples: Idaho offers tax incentives to people who replace uncertified wood stoves with ones; San Joaquin County in California forbids selling a home unless its wood stove is replaced with an EPA certified one; and Palo Alto and other municipalities in California prohibit wood burning fireplaces or stoves in new construction.

Perhaps not coincidentally, sales of wood burning appliances dropped to 235,000 in 2009 from 800,000 in 1999, according to the Hearth, Patio and Barbecue Association. And the Brick Industry Association, which promotes brick construction, reports that roughly 35,000 masonry fireplaces were installed in the United States in 2009, compared to 80,000 in 2005.

Certainly those numbers reflect the economic slowdown, but they may also be affected by growing ambivalence to wood burning fires. In any case, most fireplaces are used far too infrequently to cause any real damage to the environment, said Stephen Sears, the vice president of marketing and member services for the Brick Industry Association, voicing an opinion shared by some.

In the East,van cleef and arpels butterfly knock off necklace, he wrote in an e mail, air pollution is worst in the summer, when fireplaces aren in use, and in the West the regulations are an overreaction: it is not realistic to test each unique masonry fireplace in a laboratory to evaluate its emissions, he noted, is easier for some municipalities to arbitrarily limit the use of all wood burning fireplaces.

Karen Soucy, an associate publisher at a nonprofit environmental magazine, isn swayed by that argument. She refuses to enter a home where wood has been burned, even infrequently.

Soucy, 46, blames fumes from a wood fire for sending her to the emergency room 25 years ago with a severe asthma attack. She had been staying at a friend house in Stowe, Vt., for about a day, she said, when her lungs seized up. She was taken to a hospital in an ambulance, and got two shots of adrenalin; the doctors blamed her friend cat.

was only later, working with a team of allergy doctors and pulmonologists, did we determine the culprit to be the wood burning fumes from the various fireplaces, Soucy said.

Now her husband scouts out any place they go in advance, to be sure it free of fireplaces, and she passes up countless dinners and parties. the one who feels guilty for always being the one to decline invitations or for making people go out of their way to clean their home and I still decline, she said. smell lingers on everything. The surrounding countryside is filled with downed trees that would decompose anyway, Brown, 38, said, and Arpels, 41, gets some exercise from splitting the logs.

we not transporting things using oil from across the world to our house, she added. think this is pretty good, environmentally. Guests sometimes ask her if she feels guilty about burning wood, she said, but she recites a laundry list of the stove high efficiency features, explaining to them that the environmental impact is negligible due to the combustor, and that she mainly uses fallen wood cleared from her land or other properties nearby.

Of course, not everyone can afford such a stove, which can cost upward of $2,000, including installation (Boyle paid $3,000 for hers).

Converting a wood burning fireplace to gas can be just as expensive, and while electric fireboxes are cheaper just a few hundred dollars most consider them a poor substitute for a real fire, since there is no flame. So some people are simply using their fireplaces less often or not at all.

in the Appalachian Mountains, and I know what pollution does to us all, Treadwell said. very definitely limit fires. And the firewood for sale at the corner bodega or even the wood supplied by a delivery service might not be seasoned,van cleef arpels fake alhambra necklace, even if it is advertised as such, said David R. Brown, a public health toxicologist in Connecticut. To ensure that the wood is dry, he added, it should be stored for at least six months before being burned.

There is also the fire building technique to consider. Most people don realize that the fire should be kept hot (with high, visible flames) for the first 20 minutes, David R. Brown said, so that the chimney will heat up and the smoke will disperse; otherwise, the smoke tends to drift into the house, causing an increased health hazard.

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