Smoking with CleanSmoke provides better air quality
The figure is literally staggering: 307,000 people in the EU died prematurely in 2019 due to excessive particulate matter in the air. Almost 60 percent of them, 178,000 people, could still be alive if all EU states complied with the recently tightened WHO limits of 5 micrograms of particulate matter per cubic meter of air. That was announced by the European Environment Agency (EEA) in a recent analysis dated Nov. 15th, 2021. Conventional smokehouses also still emit too much particulate matter. And yet they could push their emissions well below the recommended limits. With the “Best Available Technique”, the CleanSmoke smoking process.
The biggest environmental health risk
“Breathing clean air should be a basic human right. It is the necessary condition for healthy and productive societies,” says Dr. Hans Henri P. Kluge, WHO Director-General for Europe. The European Union has done much to improve air quality in recent decades. According to the EEA, the number of premature deaths from particulate matter pollution fell by about one-third between 2005 and 2019. By 2030, a reduction of at least 55 percent from 2005 levels should have been achieved. That’s according to the Action Plan to Combat Air Pollution set up by the EU Commission. This comes as part of the EU’s Green Deal.
The importance of this plan is demonstrated by the fact that air pollution is one of the main causes of premature death and disease. In Europe, it is the biggest environmental health risk of all. It results primarily in heart disease and strokes, as well as lung disease and lung cancer.
“Investing in cleaner heating, mobility, agriculture and industry leads to better health, productivity and quality of life for all Europeans,” said Hans Bruyninckx, EEA Executive Director. “These investments save lives.”
CleanSmoke – smoking without pollutants
Achieving the EU’s air quality goals will require investment and many small steps from a wide range of stakeholders. One of these steps – small but effective – can be smoking with CleanSmoke.
Smoking is one of the oldest methods of preserving food and contributes to its sustainable use. But in conventional smoking, wood is smoldered, creating large amounts of ash, fine dust and smoke particles. Even when smokehouses comply with all legal requirements for exhaust air purification.
On the other hand, CleanSmoke is fresh smoke produced in the smokehouse not by burning wood, but by compressed air from primary smoke condensate. This was previously obtained centrally in a multi-stage process, where it is filtered and cleaned. Therefore, these condensates are free of harmful substances such as tar and ash and the contamination with polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) is largely eliminated.
Drastic reduction in emissions with CleanSmoke
Smoking with CleanSmoke requires neither open fires nor embers during production. As a result, no pollutants such as particulate matter, nitrogen oxides or carbon monoxide are produced. Smokehouses can reduce their particulate emissions by 87 percent and their emissions of volatile organic compounds by 67 percent with CleanSmoke. CO2 emissions can also be significantly reduced through the consistent use of CleanSmoke technology: by around 80 percent compared to conventional smoking methods.
All this is shown by analyses carried out as part of the European Eco-Innovation Action Plan. For Germany alone, the German Institute of Food Technologies (DIL) calculates that CleanSmoke has the potential to save around 600 million kilowatt hours of energy. Also, around 72,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalents could be saved per year. This is one of the reasons why the EU has named the CleanSmoke process a “Best Available Technique” (BAT). Incidentally it is the only primary technology to do so.
“Environmental and climate protection measures are often equated with bans and with giving up the pleasures of life,” says Uwe Vogel, chairman of the CleanSmoke Coalition. “The CleanSmoke process, on the other hand, is a prime example of the smart solutions we need to shape the future – a technology that simultaneously provides better air and the best taste.”