A new study in Brazil led by an Indian-origin scientist reveals that Pizza shops and steakhouses are damaging the environment in major cities by using charcoal or wood burners which produce significant emissions. As a case study researchers used the city of Sao Paolo in Brazil which is a megacity with a compulsory green policy on fuel, but is still struggling to meet pollution standards which are less stringent than Delhi or London.
They found that environment was effected to a great extent due to burning of wood in pizza restaurants and charcoal in steakhouses. Despite a green vehicle policy they found that the cities air pollution is very toxic due contributory factors like the crosswind caused by the collision of biomass burning of the Amazon rainforest and agricultural areas of Sao Paulo. The only megacity that uses a much cleaner bio-fuel driven fleet is Sao Paulo.
Though Sao Paulo consist of only 10 percent of Brazil’s total population, their residents fill their vehicles with a biofuel comprising of sugarcane ethanol, gasohol that is 75 percent gasoline and 25 percent ethanol and soya diesel. Prashant Kumar, from the University of Surrey in the UK who led the study said that 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 .These include wood burning in thousands of pizza shops or domestic waste burning. Every evening, in the city which is home to nearly 8000 pizza parlours, that have a capacity of seating nearly 600 people at a time, produce almost a million pizzas every day and we find people of all ages forming a line outside the pizzeria especially on Sundays. In the pizza parlour the busiest day in the week is Sunday, where we find that besides preparing 800 pizzas per day on old fashioned wood burning stoves another 1,000 are produced for home delivery.
