"Patio heaters are an eco disaster" - British Gas

"Gas-fired pub patio heaters are disastrous for the environment," says British Gas Energy Efficiency Manager, Jeremy Parsons. Tell me something I didn't know! He goes on to say that "Research has shown that the surge in these types of heaters since smoking bans across the UK came into force could actually stop us from achieving our Kyoto commitments by 2012. The problem is the amount of CO2 these devices emit. One heater can produce almost 4 tonnes of CO2 a year: that's more than a gas-guzzling 4x4 would produce in the same time period and around two-thirds of an average household's total yearly emissions."

British Gas surveyed 250 pubs in Scotland, where the smoking ban has been in force for a year, and found that half had bought patio heaters to appease their smoking customers. Mr Parsons calculates that over the last year, these heaters have pumped an extra 10,000 tonnes of CO2 into the environment. "You don't have to be Einstein, says our British Gas Energy Efficiency Manager, "to work out the potential impact if pubs in England follow this lead."

Too right! My local pub is talking about installing electric heaters and transferring their electricity contract to a renewable energy supplier. Some have suggested that pubs install wood burning stoves that can take "logs" made of compressed recycled paper. But my fear with this one is that we're going to start creating pollution problems.

We're seeing a lot of biomass boilers in planning applications at the moment because it's the easiest way to pass our "10% renewable energy produced on site" requirement. But we're going to have to be really careful and make sure they have decent filters installed on them. And there's one other problem with biomass boilers - the distance the fuel is transported. There's no point trucking and/or shipping wood from the other end of the world to meet a requirement that was set up to reduce carbon consumption!