Page 3494 - Week 12 - Thursday, 19 September 1991
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night so that they burn all night and you can just throw in a piece of wood in the morning. Unfortunately, that habit, that custom, is probably the single most important factor in increasing this style of pollution in the ACT.
The correct use of a wood heater - in a very brief way - is to have it burning hot. While it is burning hot it is burning efficiently, and while it is burning efficiently the amount of air pollution is minimised. The other part of having a fuelwood heater burn efficiently is to ensure that it uses dry seasoned wood. This report attempts to deal with the supply of fuelwood so that dry seasoned wood is going to become a reality in Canberra. The combination of those two factors - educating people to use their heaters properly and to use the correct wood - will mean a substantial reduction in the pollution in Canberra, without having any necessarily restrictive methods of legislation.
The next step will be to develop pollution alerting detectors for individual fuelwood heaters. These will not be detectors that in some ways are alerting people to the fact that the air outside is at a high polluting level. What the committee sees is the development of a pollution alerting device that will eventually be able to be attached to any chimney in the ACT to indicate to people that their fuelwood heater is not burning correctly.
This should not be the sort of device that brings police action, but a device that is a reminder to the household that there is a correct way to get the heater quickly to temperature and then to operate it with enough oxygen so that it burns efficiently. That technological step is not yet available to us, but it is a recommendation of this committee that we proceed towards the development of such devices.
If the pollution should continue in the ACT to the extent it has, it may be necessary to legislate to make such devices compulsory. However, it is important, as the committee saw it, first of all to ensure that people have the opportunity to do what they can to try to resolve this problem in terms of a public education process, and I will come back to that.
As far as general pollution goes, monitoring facilities are inadequate, as the committee sees it. In fact, this supports a report that was brought down last week by the Joint Parliamentary Committee on the ACT relating to pollution by motor vehicles in Civic. That committee felt that the monitoring of that style of pollution was also inadequate. It may well be that part of the public education program requires public announcements of pollution, as is done in other cities. I remember it being done in Adelaide for probably two decades, and I know that it is done in Sydney. We probably need a similar pollution warning to go out through our media, and with it should go a constant reminder to people that if they use their fuelwood devices efficiently we will not have anywhere near the difficulty with pollution.
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