Chemical characterization of particles emitted from wood-fired pizza ovens in Italy

Biomass burning represents an important source of air pollution with adverse effects on air quality, climate change and health. Emissions from wood-oven pizzerias are scarcely investigated despite representing an increasing air quality concern, especially at urban locations. In the Italian territory, 8 million pizzas are daily produced and up to 85% are cooked in wood-fired ovens. Emissions from wood-oven pizzerias are highly uncertain, due to missing legislation on emission standards and controls. The information necessary to estimate emissions from this source, like number of wood-ovens, quantity and type of wood consumed, operating hours, are uncertain and often not available. At the Italian national level, this estimate is missing in the emission inventory, while the most recent inventory of the Lombardy region (INEMAR - Arpa Lombardia, 2022) estimates a contribution to total emissions of respectively 7% and 8% for PM10 and PM2.5, 3% for BC and 5% for BaP. Despite these first evidences, there is a remarkable lack of experimental data on emissions and chemical characterization from this source. Moreover, there are no specific technical standards or metrology for the sampling systems or specific test methods to analyse pollutants (Bergomi et al., 2022). A project between ENEA and the Italian Environmental Ministry, with the aim to determine the concentrations of the main pollutants emitted by this source and to characterize PM emissions, is here presented. A survey on wood-oven pizzerias in the two metropolitan areas of Milan and Rome was conducted, an innovative sampling system was designed, and different tests were carried out. The sampling line employed by ENEA was developed by Innovhub as part of the Profile Pizza project. ENEA and Innovhub projects share the same goals. The adopted sampling scheme is reported in Figure 1. Different pollutants and tracers were analysed (PM2.5 and PM10, Total suspended particulate (TSP) sampled in the hot and diluted flue gas; PAH and BaP; CO; NOx; OGC; Levoglucosan, to obtain emission factors for each pollutant. The measurement campaigns were conducted on different types of ovens and testing different combustion cycles and operational phases. The ovens used in the experimental tests are a traditional wood-fired with a capacity of 6 pizzas fed by both beech wood logs and beech briquettes, and a combined gas and wood fired with a capacity of 4 pizzas used in different ways (only gas; only wood; combined gas and wood). The project results are extremely innovative and would be very useful in estimating and characterizing emissions from this source

Holistic Assessment for Social Housing Retrofitting: Integrating Seismic, Energy, and Social Aspects in the REHOUSE Project

There are many existing buildings for which seismic rehabilitation interventions are required, especially in earthquake-prone areas like Italy. At the same time, the huge energy cost increase in Europe highlights the need for sustainable techniques that are able to increase the energy efficiency of buildings. These issues are even more significant for weak social groups living in social housing buildings, often in poor and vulnerable conditions. In order to address the solution regarding building renovations from the social, structural, and energy efficiency perspectives, in the framework of the Horizon Europe REHOUSE (Renovation packagEs for HOlistic improvement of EU’s bUildingS Efficiency, maximizing RES generation and cost-effectiveness) Project, this paper proposes an integrated methodology of building assessment that was tested on a social housing building in Margherita di Savoia, a small town of Apulia Region, Italy. In addition to the structural and energy aspects, the social one is particularly important since the building is located in the “Capitanata Area”, considered to be one of the most socially vulnerable areas in Italy. For this reason, an assessment methodology must consider reducing the overall impact of the assessment activities while explaining to tenants the purpose of the assessment and future renovation actions, maintaining the accuracy of the assessment results. Therefore, this study outlines an assessment methodology, demonstrated through its application to the case study building, that integrates the structural, energy, and social aspects, showing that the tenants’ involvement is also crucial for the technical evaluations. The final result is a low-impact approach for the building knowledge gathering needed to start a deep renovation intervention in social housing

Experimental investigations of the influence of transitory phases on small-scale wood combustion emissions

To investigate the influence of transitory phases on average emission factors of small-scale wood combustion plants, a specific study was carried out. Several on-line measurements have been carried out for the aerosol and gas emitted from an open fireplace (8 kW), a closed fireplace (I I kW), a conventional wood stove (6.5 kW) under different operating conditions during initial kindling and refilling stages. Some tests have also been performed with different fuel types and moisture level. Results confirm that emissions are generally higher during transient phases. The paper provides a description of measuring techniques and results obtained under tested conditions for different pollutants and appliances

Emission factors from small scale appliances burning wood and pellets

Four manually fed (6-11 kW) firewood burning and two automatic wood pellets (8.8-25 kW) residential heating appliances were tested under real-world operating conditions in order to determine emission factors (EFs) of macro pollutants, i.e., carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen oxides (NOx), non-methane hydrocarbons (NMHC), particulate matter (PM) and trace pollutants such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) and dioxins. The results were examined for the influence of different factors (i.e., type of wood, appliance and combustion cycle). The experimental EFs were also compared with the values proposed by the European emission inventory guidebook used in the local inventory in order to evaluate their representativeness of real world emissions. The composite macropollutant EFs for manually fed appliances were: for CO 5858 g GJ-1, for NOx 122 g GJ-1, NMHC 542 g GJ-1, PM 254 g GJ-1, whereas emissions were much lower for automatic pellets appliances: CO 219 g GJ-1, for NOx 66 g GJ-1, NMHC 5 g GJ-1, PM 85 g GJ-1. The highest emissions were generally observed for the open fireplace, however traditional and advanced stoves have the highest overall CO EFs. Especially for the advanced stove real-world emissions are far worse than those measured under cycles used for type testing of residential solid fuel appliances. No great difference is observed for different firewood types in batch working appliances, diversely the quality of the pellets is observed to influence directly the emission performance of the automatic appliances. Benzo(b)fluoranthene is the PAH with the highest contribution (110 mg GJ-1 for manual appliances and 2 mg GJ-1 for automatic devices) followed by benzo(a)pyrene (77 mg GJ-1 for manual appliances and 0.8 mg GJ-1 for automatic devices

Start-up of commercial high level waste vitrification facilities at La Hague

Communication to : 3. International Conference on Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing and Waste Management, Sendai (JP), 14-18 apr., 1991SIGLEAvailable at INIST (FR), Document Supply Service, under shelf-number : RM 1306 / INIST-CNRS - Institut de l'Information Scientifique et TechniqueFRFranc