Your Fancy, Wood-Baked Pizza Is Ruining the Environment

Pizza: the combination of oozing cheese and rich tomato sauce topping a crispy-on-the-outside, kinda-doughy-in-the-middle base will forever and always be everyone's favourite food, not to mention the best food-based emoji.

But according to new research, the universally loved pie may not be as faultless as we thought. A recent study by air pollution academics from across the world at the University Global Partnership Network has found that wood-burning pizza ovens pose an emerging environmental risk.

Published last week in the Atmospheric Environment journal, the research used the Brazilian city of São Paulo as its sample "megacity" (defined as having more than 10 million inhabitants) to study challenges to air quality. It found that the city burned over 307,000 tonnes of wood each year, thanks to its 8,000 pizzerias.

Lead author of the study Dr. Prashant Kumar from the University of Surrey, said in a press release that this volume of wood-burning is a threat to the environment: "There are more than 7.5 hectares of Eucalyptus forest being burned every month by pizzerias and steakhouses. This is significant enough of a threat to be of real concern to the environment negating the positive effect on the environment that compulsory green biofuel policy has on vehicles."

In spite of its green fuel policy (São Paulians use biofuels made of sugarcane, ethanol, gasohol, and soya diesel), the researchers found that the city was still missing targets for cleaner air. Kumar cites pizza-loving inhabitants' penchant for wood-burning stove ovens as part of the problem: "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."

Pizza may not immediately spring to mind when thinking of Brazilian cuisine, but the study found that "close to a million pizzas a day" are produced in São Paulo. Sunday is the busiest day of the week, with many families heading to their local pizzeria for dinner.

Sunday pizza versus Sunday roast? We know who'd win that one.

But São Paulo's love of pizza may have serious implications. Kumar said: "We believe that the contents of this new direction provides an unprecedented approach in examining the adverse impact of air pollution in such a unique megacity as São Paulo."

There's something to think about next time you bite into a wood-baked slice.