Air pollution from furnaces, boilers and bonfires

This guidance is for businesses that burn:

• fuels in furnaces or boilers
• waste material in the open, including on farms, building sites and demolition sites.

If any burning activity on your site causes, or is likely to cause, a nuisance, your local council can force you to stop the activity. If you fail to do so, you could be fined. In addition, anybody that the nuisance affects can go directly to the courts to ask for an order to have it stopped.

This guidance will also be useful if you carry out an operation that causes black smoke and the operation is not included as part of a process or installation regulated under one of the following:

• environmental permitting (England and Wales)
• pollution prevention and control (Northern Ireland and Scotland)
• local air pollution control (Northern Ireland and Scotland).

In this guideline: