A town in Italy has outlawed wood burning pizza stoves over high air pollution levels. Photo: Basheer Tome/Flickr 
 
 The Local · 21 Dec 2015, 16:33 
 
 Published: 21 Dec 2015 16:33 GMT+01:00 
 
 A town in the southern Italian region of Campania has issued an edict that could stop its pizzerias from operating in a bid to put paid to a mysterious smog hanging over the city. 
 
 San Vitaliano, a town of 6,000 inhabitants north of Naples, has one of the highest rates of air pollution in Italy. Last year residents spent a whopping 114 days breathing air that contained levels of polluting particulates above safe levels. 
 
 To put that into perspective, the citizens of Milan, Lombardy's industrial capital, spent 86 days breathing unsafe air. So what's polluting San Vitaliano? A new ordinance from the mayor's office blames its innumerable pizzerias. 
 
 Convinced that the traditional wood-burning pizza stoves are clogging up the lungs of his citizens, Mayor Antonio Falcone has decided to outlaw them as a precautionary measure. 
 
 SEE ALSO: Ten bizarre but tempting non-Italian pizzas 
 
 “As of today, in spite of several tests carried out by the environment agency, Arpac, we are still unsure of the cause of the pollution,” wrote the mayor. “But the situation has got worse during the winter and we need to take maximum precautions to ensure the problem doesn't deteriorate. 
 
 “Agricultural, artisanal, industrial and commercial producers are hereby forbidden from burning solid biomass such as wood, woodchips, coal and charcoal. The only exceptions are for those which have filter systems in place that will guarantee the elimination of 80 percent of all polluting Pm10 particulates.” 
 
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 The new legislation came into force on December 17th and will apply until June 30th next year. The measures will cease to be active over the summer months but will come into force again in October 2016. 
 
 
 
 The move will cause the town's many pizzerias and artisanal bakeries to change their fuel sources or install costly filters to reduce pollution – a fact which has angered local business owners. 
 
 
 
 Those caught breaking the ban will face fines of between €200 and €1,032. 
 
 “Shocking, it's so ridiculous. They don't want us to make pizza?” Massimilliano Arichello of the locally famous pizzeria Taverna 191 told local paper Il Mattino. 
 
 
 
 “We make about 34 pizzas a day, how do they think we are responsible for the pollution problems around here?” ||||| Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Pizza-making is one of the factors that have made St Vitaliano one of the worst-polluted towns in Italy 
 
 A town in Italy has imposed a temporary ban on the traditional way of pizza-making as a measure to curb soaring pollution. 
 
 An edict issued by the mayor of San Vitaliano, just outside of Naples, bans the use of wood-fired stoves in bakeries and eateries including pizzerias unless their owners install special filters to reduce air pollution. 
 
 The measure has been prompted by "utmost concern" over worsening air quality, and will stay in place until 31 March. It can be reintroduced later if the new filtering systems prove ineffective. 
 
 The ban will be enforced by police checks, and those found in breach of the mayor's order will face fines of up to 1,032 euros (£760, $1,130). 
 
 Bad air quality is a longstanding problem for San Vitaliano. According to Il Mattino newspaper, it is more polluted than Beijing, while nearby Naples - usually seen as one of Italy's worst offenders in terms of air quality - seems like "a perfumed garden" in comparison. In 2015, San Vitaliano exceeded the threshold for emissions 114 times, compared to 86 times in Milan, another badly polluted Italian city, the paper says. 
 
 But not everyone is convinced that pizza-making is the true culprit. Local residents and pizza makers held a protest on Sunday in front of the town hall against the mayor's order. "We can't be the cause of the smog," said one, according a report in Corriere della Sera. "Naples has many more pizzerias than San Vitaliano but doesn't have the same pollution levels. It's clear that they don't want to pinpoint the real cause. This order is a very costly mistake for us." 
 
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 Use #NewsfromElsewhere to stay up-to-date with our reports via Twitter. ||||| And forces are now converging to heighten the tension in this seemingly unlikely pollution story. Civil fines by Fairbanks North Star Borough — which includes the cities of Fairbanks and North Pole, with a total population of about 100,000 — could be assessed in coming days against residential polluters. The E.P.A. could declare the entire area to be in “serious” noncompliance of the Clean Air Act early next year, with potentially huge economic implications, including a cutoff of federal transportation funds. 
 
 Some residents said they feared that an overreaching government, locally and in Washington, was out to take away their stoves. Others, like Dr. Olson, who works with racing sled dogs in her veterinary practice and volunteers with Citizens for Clean Air, a local group that has sued the E.P.A. to force a decision on Fairbanks pollution, said the exact opposite. 
 
 The government, Dr. Olson said, has been endangering public health by dragging its feet. For six consecutive days in mid-December, the air here was declared “unhealthy,” for high particulate content — the longest streak since the current monitoring system began in late 2015, according to the borough’s air quality division. 
 
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 “Both sides are digging in their heels,” said the borough’s mayor, Karl Kassel, who has been calling residents to chat about their heating systems and to urge them to upgrade, with financial help from the borough, to more efficient wood stoves. “We have been settieng ourselves up for a crescendo.” 
 
 Certainly, no one from the E.P.A. or in local government is saying this part of Alaska is universally polluted. The problem, they say, is often block by block or street by street, because in the deep cold inversions, particulate pollution settles to the lowest areas in a basin surrounded by hills. Fairbanks North Star Borough is about the size of New Jersey, most of it wooded, wild and dazzlingly beautiful in winter. 
 
 “We have a weather problem, we have inversions here that trap air, and it’s something that can’t be solved,” said Lance Roberts, a member of the Borough Assembly. 
 
 Residents are also trapped, he said, by economics. Natural gas, a much cleaner fuel source, is not widely available in this part of Alaska, and heating oil can be very expensive. Oil also produces particulate pollution, though less than wood. A study for the borough last year said residents here spent, on average, almost four times the national average in annual heating costs. 
 
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 “People up here tend to be more independent,” Mr. Roberts added. “They came up here to get away from the regulatory environment that’s down in the lower 48, so they definitely see the E.P.A. as coming after wood stoves and trying to cut out that kind of independent lifestyle where you can live off the grid.” 
 
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 Mr. Hamlin, the E.P.A. official, said his agency was definitely not trying to take away anyone’s wood stove, or make life more expensive. But he said the Clean Air Act, passed by Congress in 1970, requires a standard of breathable air for all Americans. The E.P.A. was given the job of enforcing that standard. 
 
 “We don’t want to be telling people what to do, but the standard is what it is, and we want to work with you to be able to get there,” he said. 
 
 Critics of government intervention, led by a local representative in the Alaska Legislature, Tammie Wilson, said they were ready to fight back with a lawsuit if the borough started fining homeowners for smoke violations, especially if their homes are far from the monitor that is recording air quality in the community. The North Pole air monitor regularly records some of the highest local concentrations of particulate pollution in the nation. 
 
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 “They’re allowing themselves to be bullied by the E.P.A.,” said Ms. Wilson, a Republican. “And there’s going to be an uproar. We already have a big group of people who will make sure there is money to take it to court so that we can finally prove that the way they’re doing air quality doesn’t make any sense.” 
 
 Some residents are taking action on their own. Morgan Boatman said he had begun to understand local air quality problems more deeply in chatting with Dr. Olson, who cares for his dogs at her veterinary clinic. Last month, he shut down his old boiler system and had a high-efficiency masonry furnace installed in its place, at a cost of about $25,000. 
 
 “I’m not big on government, and I think there’s a lot of overreach, but I’m trying to be a good steward,” he said. “I see now that there is a problem.”
– Few things are more Italian than baking pizza in a perfectly smoldering wood-fired stove, so San Vitaliano's move to ban the beloved practice comes as a surprise. The town of 6,000 north of Naples has some of the worst air pollution in Italy—Il Mattino says its air quality is worse than Beijing's, while Naples is "a perfumed garden" in comparison—but environmental tests have failed to identify the source. In an effort to "take maximum precautions to ensure the problem doesn't deteriorate," Mayor Antonio Falcone has banned "agricultural, artisanal, industrial, and commercial producers … from burning solid biomass such as wood, woodchips, coal, and charcoal," unless filter systems are in place to eliminate 80% of pollutants, reports the Local. The rule will be in place until at least the end of March, reports the BBC. The Local reports the plan is to relieve the rule in July, August, and September—the situation is poorest in winter, Falcone says—but most pizzerias and bakeries will be forced to change their fuel sources, buy expensive filters, or face fines up to $1,100. "Shocking, it's so ridiculous," a rep from a local pizzeria tells Il Mattino. "We make about 34 pizzas a day, how do they think we are responsible for the pollution problems around here?" "We can't be the cause of the smog," a local who protested outside San Vitaliano's town hall on Sunday adds, per Corriere della Sera. "Naples has many more pizzerias than San Vitaliano but doesn't have the same pollution levels. It's clear that they don't want to pinpoint the real cause. This order is a very costly mistake for us." The BBC reports San Vitaliano residents saw 114 days of unsafe air levels in 2015, compared to Naples' 86.