21.1 Sector Descriptions and Overview

Burning wood in campfires is often an outdoor recreational activity enjoyed by many outdoor enthusiasts. This activity is usually limited to publicly or privately owned camp sites, which can sometimes be located in local/state/national parks. Campfires are a source of air pollution since burning wood emits multiple air pollutants, both gaseous and particulate pollutants including criteria air pollutants and precursors, hazardous air pollutants and greenhouse gases. Prior to the 2023 NEI, EPA did not estimate emissions from this category; however, EPA became aware of a database of campgrounds that enabled us to create county level estimates for this emissions source. While the emission impacts from campfires is expected to be minimal at the national and even State level, adding campfires as an EPA method serves to make the NEI more complete, one of the basic tenets we have with every NEI.

For the 2023 NEI, we propose crafting a national set of county-level emission estimates for campfires based on the database of campgrounds which provides the number of campsites per campground (for most campgrounds) and the geographic information that enables the number of campsites to be mapped to counties. We use assumptions on the amount of firewood (cords) used per campfire at a campsite, and the number of campfires per campsite per year. This allows us to estimate the cords of wood burned in campfires in each county. The cords of wood per county per year are then converted to tons of dry wood per county per year and multiplied by pollutant-specific emission factors to generate emissions per year per pollutant. Given that the data on campsites is not maintained annually, this value will not change by inventory year unless another source of data for campsites is found.

The SCC for campfires is “2810090001” and the full SCC description is “Miscellaneous Area Sources: Other Combustion; Open Fire; Campfires”. The EIS Sector is “Miscellaneous Non-Industrial NEC”. This document describes the methods used for calculating campfire emissions by describing the data and assumptions used to generate the activity data and providing the basis of the emission factors. Activity data is based in part on an open-source campground database which is used to compute county-level camp sites information. Pollutant emission factors are adopted from the fireplace SCC which already exists in the Wagon Wheel.