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Rural burning – I've had enough

 
Well & Truly Off The Grid
Last Post by EtchedPixels 17 minutes ago
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Mars
 Mars
(@editor)
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Joined: 5 years ago
Posts: 4666
Topic starter 31/05/2026 10:04 am   [#3032]

I'm going to have a rant!

We live in the countryside (beautiful, yes) but every few weeks we get absolutely smoked out by what I can only assume is industrial-scale burning from neighbouring farms and a garden centre. This weekend has been horrendous. Forty-eight hours of thick, acrid smoke filling the entire valley. Every window in the house shut all weekend. Our bedroom air purifier on red, continuously, for two days straight. Both my wife and I have had splitting headaches and we feel ill.

And I'm not talking about a pleasant woodsmoke smell here. It starts that way (maybe) but then the colour of the smoke changes and it gets greyer and darker and the smell turns chemical and honestly quite revolting. I'd put good money on plastic and/or chemicals going into that fire. Which means we're breathing toxins. PM2.5 particulate matter. Whatever other poisonous rubbish is being chucked on there.

What really gets me is the timing. It doesn't happen every weekend. Every few weeks. But it almost always starts on a Friday afternoon. Always. And it's always done and dusted by Monday morning. You don't need me to join those dots. If you're burning legitimate waste within the rules, you don't need to wait for a Friday afternoon to do it. They know exactly what they're putting on that fire and they know exactly why the weekend suits them.

I called the authorities this weekend. Twice. I won't bore you with how that went.

But here's the thing that is driving me insane. We live in a country where ordinary homeowners are made to feel guilty about everything that burns. Wood burning stoves are practically a moral failing now. We debate biomass carbon accounting. We're all being pushed toward heat pumps and clean air and net zero. Rightly so. But apparently none of that applies if you've got acres of fields. Then you can just burn whatever the hell you like all weekend while your neighbours choke, and nobody in authority seems to have the slightest interest in doing anything about it.

It's absolute madness. Has anyone else dealt with this? And does anyone actually know if there's any real recourse, because right now it feels like there isn't any.


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 EtchedPixels
(@etchedpixels)
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Joined: 4 days ago
Posts: 13
31/05/2026 10:44 am  

Rural waste burning is generally an organized crime operation. The councils have no funds to take people on, if you phone the police on the weekend you'll get the lone officer holding the fort, at best. In many cases the farmers involved are threatened/forced into it by the gangs. It's turned into something rather more like Italy on waste because there's no money to enforce anything any more.

I would start instead with

- Your police and crime commissioner (cc your MP). They don't have anything else useful to do and they are getting abolished soon anyway.

- Environment agency (not that they've got enough money to stop people putting poop in rivers even)

- Local paper if you are lucky enough to still have one

- NFU (sounds silly but if your local farmers are caught up by organized criminals they may be in a good position to help)

- And you can report what you believe to be serious/organized crime direct to the NCA, so it hits an intelligence gathering outfit rather than the local weekend copper trying to do 100 things at once.



   
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