New York City wants to reduce emissions from its iconic pizza ovens

New York City is undoubtedly the pizza capital of the US, with an estimated 1,700 pizzerias across the five boroughs.

A new city rule aims to cut down on the harmful emissions and pollutants generated by making pizza the old-fashioned way, with coal or wood-fired ovens.

The New York City Department of Environmental is drafting rules which would require those with these ovens, installed before May 2016, to potentially add on emissions-reductions devices to their legacy pizza ovens, according to The New York Post.

“All New Yorkers deserve to breathe healthy air and wood and coal-fired stoves are among the largest contributors of harmful pollutants in neighborhoods with poor air quality,” and agency spokesperson told the paper on Sunday. “This common-sense rule, developed with restaurant and environmental justice groups, requires a professional review of whether installing emission controls is feasible.”

Burning coal and wood can generate pollutants harmful to human and environmental health, including ozone, aerosols, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, benzene, and black carbon.

In particular, compounds from these types of ovens like black carbon and methan are many times more potent greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide, Inside Climate News reports.

Under the proposed rules, pizzerias would need to hire an architect or engineer to study whether it was feasible to install emisisons controls that could cut down on particulates by 75 per cent.

Pizzerias that couldn’t achieve such reductions would be tasked with trying to cut down by at least 25 per cent, or explaining why those reductions wouldn’t be possible.

The potential rule, estimated to impact less than 100 restaurants, also contains the ability to apply for variances.

Some pizza owners took issue with the proposed regulations.

“If you f*** around with the temperature in the oven you change the taste. That pipe, that chimney, it’s that size to create the perfect updraft, keeps the temp perfect, it’s an art as much as a science. You take away the char, the thing that makes the pizza taste great, you kill it,” one restauranteur told the paper, speaking anonymously.

“And for what? You really think that you’re changing the environment with these eight or nine pizza ovens?!”

The earliest New York pizzerias used coal ovens at the turn of the 20th century that were originally built to bake bread. Chefs later adopted wood-fired ovens and eventually gas-fired rigs by the mid-1900s, according to Serious Eats.