European Commission is preparing a new directive for fireplaces in Europe. This directive will set minimum limits for the efficiency of a fireplace and regulate how much carbon monoxide, hydrocarbon, particulate emission, and nitrogen oxide can be released to the air from a fireplace.

Old fireplaces are excluded from the directive, but many fireplace manufactures, like Uunisepät from Finland, have been taking these harmful effects already into account in their production. This means that the directive will not affect the big and reliable fireplace manufacturers, who have been maintaining higher standards in their product design: for example Uunisepät have manufactured over 100 000 fireplaces that are already according to the upcoming directive.

The new regulation for fireplaces in the EC will come into use in 2012. All fireplaces, apart from sauna stoves and grills, will be under this directive. In Finland itself, there are 2,2 million fireplaces – and most of them will not fulfill the upcoming EC directive. Fireplace manufacturers from Finland have set up campaigns in order to get old fireplaces under the same regulation as well. Most of the manufacturers have already followed similar kinds of, or even stricter, regulations in their product design, and they see old fireplaces as a risk for the whole industry.

The reason for this directive is both environmental and health related. According to some estimates, in the year 2000 there were 200 premature deaths in Finland caused by particle emissions released incorrectly from burning wood. The real numbers are hard to count, as old fireplaces are seldom tested. It’s telling of the importance of this issue by that the government of Finland started its own law-drafting for fireplace standards in 2006. The project was cancelled when the European Commission’s drafts were published.

Since the harmful effect is not about burning wood, but burning wood the wrong way, it is more important to get acquainted with the guidelines of how to burn wood the right way. A good indicator is the color of smoke in the burning process, but one cannot count on that: lucid smoke might contain particle emissions that cannot be seen by the human eye.