What are you burning in your fireplace?

If your Spring is anything like ours in Portland, then baby it's still cold outside. Our heat settings remain unchanged (68 daytime) and it's tempting to start a fire some days, because who doesn't love a fire? I love a fire. The crackling, warm coziness of it, and I think that contrary to many reports on the inefficiency of wood-burning fireplaces, ours actually does make us warmer. Or maybe it's psychological. Regardless, I'm realizing, sadly, that burning just about anything is bad for the air.

Wood is the worst culprit, which is bad news for folks who heat their entire homes with wood-burning fireplaces. In some parts of the country, like New England, it's very common. But after reading about Montreal's proposed ban on burning wood, I wonder if the same may be coming to a city near you. In Montreal they discovered that the air quality was far worse in leafy, suburban areas where most people use wood-burning stoves to heat their homes than in downtown Montreal! Even with all of the transportation and industrial exhaust in the city, you're better off taking deep breaths on a downtown Montreal sidewalk than in the quieter burbs.

So what happens when you burn wood? According to the above article, fine toxic particles are released into the air, and when inhaled cause chronic asthma and bronchitis, particularly in children. It's a serious health and environmental problem, and some small Canadian towns have already approved the ban. Suddenly that cozy fire doesn't seem so important anymore.

Is there a happy medium? Is there anything 'safe' to burn? Pellet stoves are being hyped as a good alternative, though they require electricity to run. We've been burning Java Logs, which are made from coffee grounds, on occasion this past winter (on recommendation from EnviroMom readers!). They are supposedly cleaner-burning than wood (and ditto on Duraflame logs), but they must be releasing something into the air. Plus there must be emissions from the manufacturing of these logs.

Regardless, for my family a fireplace is a luxury item. It is non-essential. Could we give it up, knowing that we're contributing to an environmental nightmare? Probably. I mean, if they were banned then of course we would. But why not just do it because it's the right thing to do? Why wait for the ban? Replacing it with a gas insert isn't terribly appealing because I'm really not a fan of gas (in any form, ha ha) plus the expense is prohibitive (for us). It's really surreal when you think that wood-burning heat is the way people have warmed themselves for hundreds, heck, thousands of years. Now all of a sudden it's a 'bad' thing. Sniff. Sad, but true. I wish some expert would just come up to me and say "Stop burning anything in your fireplace because it's all bad!", or better yet, "You can burn Java or Duraflame Logs on occasion because a little use is OK."

What do you think? Could you give up your non-essential fire habits? Do you rely on wood to heat your home?