New Study Explains How Pizza Can Be Bad For The Environment

A new study has found that pizza restaurants and steakhouses are posing a great threat to the environment as use of charcoal or wood burners result in significant emissions.

According to the study conducted by a team of air pollution experts, led by the University of Surrey's Prashant Kumar from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, wood burning stoves in pizza restaurants and charcoal in steakhouses churn out dangerous emissions which contribute to air pollution.

The study was conducted in Sao Paulo in Brazil as the researchers wanted to find out why the megacity, which has a compulsory green policy on fuel, still struggles to meet pollution standards.

As per Economic Times report, Sao Paulo is home to more than 8,000 pizza restaurants that makes nearly a million pizzas a day. Around 800 pizzas a day are made using wood-burning stoves in pizzerias and even a thousand more are prepared for home delivery.

The research team claims that while car emissions remain the dominant pollutors, the burning of wood is also a significant contributor to pollution.

"It became evident from our work that despite there not being the same high level of pollutants from vehicles in the city as other megacities, there had not been much consideration of some of the unaccounted sources of emissions," said Dr Prashant Kumar, lead author of the study. "These include wood burning in thousands of pizza shops or domestic waste burning."

Dr Kumar added that pizzerias and steakhouses burn more than 7.5 hectares of eucalyptus forest every month and around 307,000 tonnes of wood a year. This as a result is reversing the positive effect on the environment that compulsory green biofuel policy has on vehicles.

The researchers also noted that it also has an impact on the neighbouring Amazon rain forest as biomass burning from the southern edge of the forest can be transported across the Atlantic coast to Brazil.

The study findings have been published in the journal Atmospheric Environment.