Warming up, nicely

This may be the era of global warming, but heating our homes and workplaces is still a necessity for two-thirds of the year. Like it or not, we’ve become accustomed to ambient temperatures deep inside the comfort zone. And when every teenager claims the right to walk around the house in clothes more suited for a night’s clubbing in balmy Ibiza than a chill English February, then the search for more sustainable warmth is ever more urgent. These Ashden Award winners are living examples of how to make that happen.

Wood – fuel of the future
Heating our homes with wood instead of coal sounds like a throwback to some rural idyll, rather than a step into the future. It sounds all the more bizarre when you hear that one of its proponents is the council in Barnsley – birthplace to Arthur Scargill, slap in the heart of the mighty Yorkshire coalfields. But unlike fossil fuels, wood – as long as it’s harvested sustainably – is both renewable and carbon-neutral, and Barnsley Council is in no doubt that it’s a fuel of the future. It’s converting the boilers in some of its council flats from coal to woodchips – sourced mainly from local tree surgery waste. And tenants like Mrs Brady are full of praise for a scheme which saves them money and does away with coal’s soot, smoke and delivery noise. “The coal used to spew fumes out”, she says. “The balcony used to be three inches thick in coal dust! [But] now I’m saving pounds – I can go on holidays!” Barnsley’s made a bold commitment to use wood and other biomass for heating all new and refurbished public buildings, so long as the lifetime costs are favourable. In doing so, it’s kick-starting a new woodchip industry in the area, supplying fuel for initiatives like the civic centre district heating scheme. Here, it has replaced gas with a new 500kW wood-fired boiler, providing heating for the new council headquarters as well as the town hall and library. Barnsley isn’t alone in having a surplus of wood ripe for burning. London’s streets and parks are surprisingly rich in trees. Most people rarely pause to think how it is that they don’t all grow into tangled giants, uprooting pavements and turning the city into, literally, an urban jungle. The answer is tree surgery: the endless round of trimming, clipping and chopping that keeps the trees a manageable size. It’s a process that creates a lot of woody waste – which at present is mainly sent to landfill – at a cost of around £50 a tonne. Not only is this a pretty pricey way to fill up our dwindling landfill sites – it’s also consigning to the rubbish dump a valuable potential fuel. Now the Bioregional Group, in partnership with the London Borough of Croydon and City Suburban Tree Surgeons, has developed a ‘TreeStation’ site, where waste wood is turned into woodchips. It already supplies over 10,000 tonnes a year to Slough Heat and Power, producing electricity and heat for a local trading estate. Now that the idea’s been proved in practice, several other London boroughs are planning on having their own TreeStations, and there’s also growing interest in using the woodchips in smaller heating boilers around the capital, too. – MW

2 July 2006

Martin Wright