17/06/25

What’s better for the environment: a Wood Burner or an Incinerator?

If there is one misconception that we get asked about regularly here at Addfield, it would be about smoke, odour and emissions after incineration or cremation. To help our customers compare an Addfield machine to something they may be a bit more familiar with, is to compare it to a typical wood burner. The technology from Addfield can offer a smoke and odour free experience, unlike a wood burner.

While wood burners are not a modern invention, they are becoming increasingly popular again and can be found in many homes in the 21st century, either as a fireplace or a stove. Wood burners, just as the name implies, burns wood in order to generate heat, and the unit usually consists of just a combustion chamber and chimney.

If we travel back in time to when wood burning fires were at the centre of the home, with the whole family crowded around the stove to warm up and cook, you can imagine the smoke filling the room!

Shortly after, a stove/chamber was designed to hold the fire in the corner of the room, followed by the invention of the chimney, to vent the smoke out of the room.

Even today with modern upgrades, it has been recorded how bad a wood burner can be for the environment, with the emissions released from using them, especially if multiple houses are using them for hours on end to heat their homes or cook their food.

Incineration and cremation may sound similar to wood burning, as both include burning items in a combustion chamber at high temperatures, but that is where the similarity ends.

While incinerators and cremators may not be as old as wood burners, we still have many years of development that has led to the most environmentally sustainable technology designed, throughout the whole Addfield range.

Let’s take pet cremation for example. Pet cremation as a business has boomed immensely over the years with many industries diversifying their business to include pet and horse cremation services. Many businesses will install a pet cremator in residential areas or on their own land if available. When people hear the word ‘cremator’ they may be concerned about what the process is doing to the environment, especially if they live near where the cremator is installed. We are often approached by concerned residents, and we are able to put their minds at ease.

A typical wood burner is a fairly simple system. It consists of one chamber and a chimney with logs and other materials being thrown in and ignited at temperatures fluctuating from 360°C/680°F to a peak of around 600°C/1112°F. These temperatures are not hot enough to produce clean gases. The gases, smoke and odours produced during combustion are released directly into the atmosphere without any cleaning. This is why you will see smoke billowing from chimneys and smell the distinct odour that comes from it in some residential areas.

In comparison, all Addfield incinerators and cremators are purposely built to handle a whole range of waste types safely and environmentally friendly. The pet and agricultural range burn at temperatures as high as 800°C/1470°F in the primary chamber, some equipped with additional hot hearth technology, heating the chamber from above and below to ensure full cremation of the animal. Whilst our medical and more complex machines burn as high as 850°C/1562°F. These temperatures are high enough to release cleaner gases into the secondary chamber.

Not included on a wood burner, the secondary chamber acts as a filtration gas cleaning system, with temperatures reaching 980°C/1800°F for the pets and animal machines, 1100°C/2012°F on the medical side. A 2 second retention time in the secondary chamber is the time the flue gases take to travel through the secondary chamber to ensure complete cleaning.

The secondary chamber always reaches operational temperature before anything in the primary chamber starts to burn, so any gases released from the cremation or incineration are treated from the very start of the process. The machine will never start the burning process until it can safely clean the gases.

Where a wood burner is designed to released heat out of the chamber, it is quite the opposite for an Addfield machine. Each chamber is lined with an advanced brick refractory, our alumina infused fire brick holds and releases the heat back into the chamber, behind the brick we have two further layers made up of insulation brick and board, these layers block the heat from escaping meaning it can only go one way from the fire brick and that’s back into the chamber. This means no heat is lost from the chamber, completing the cremation using 40% less fuel and is significantly safer to operate compared to alternative solutions.

This technology is what makes Addfield machines smoke and odour free, the most you are likely to see coming out of the chimney is a faint heat shimmer, which is very miniscule compared to the amount of smoke from a wood burner.

Even with the latest regulations that came into effect in 2022, meaning that all wood burners had to meet certain environmental standards and guidelines, Addfield incinerators and cremators are proven significantly more environmentally friendly due to the added filtration of the secondary chamber and brick lined refractory.

Addfield has always prided itself on its accessibility and dedication so if you have any question on the real world impact of one of our machines in your neighbourhood, please feel free to reach out to us at sales@addfield.com