“We really need it (…) especially in this difficult year”, says Yiannis Dimitrakopoulos, a 75-year-old retiree who came to collect wood in Glyfada, about twenty kilometers from the center of the Greek capital.
A little further on, dozens of motorists are patiently waiting their turn.
“We try to take as much wood as possible. We have oil-fired central heating but you never know,” said a fifty-year-old professor, Erofili Generali. Her husband is busy filling their trunk with wood, notably from the spring and autumn pruning of the Glyfada trees.
If in this residential suburb of the Athenian “Riviera” winter temperatures remain reasonable, its inhabitants, like those of the rest of Greece, have found themselves stunned by the explosion of energy prices due to the war in Ukraine.
– No heating in winter –
In September, natural gas prices more than quadrupled (332%) to the point that many Greeks fear not being able to heat themselves during the winter months. And all the more so since for six months, inflation has exceeded 10% in a country that bears the consequences of a decade of financial crisis.
“After the fall of many trees during a snowstorm in January, we decided not to recycle the wood into industrial fuel as we used to do” before, explains to AFP Annie Kafka, assistant to the Civil Protection of Glyfada Town Hall. But it was cut to “offer it to households because of the energy crisis”.
“We feel betrayed with these exorbitant prices” of natural gas, indignant Yannis Dimitrakopoulos who recalls that the Greek State has widely promoted this method of heating in recent years.
The apartments and houses of Glyfada, which has some 90,000 inhabitants, are mainly equipped with oil-fired central heating or, for the most recent ones, natural gas.
The chimneys installed in some dwellings are only used as a supplement.
Launched in early October, the Glyfada Town Hall initiative is usually held twice a week. About 3,000 households have already taken advantage of it as demand explodes: 14,000 people have registered on the town hall’s internet platform, details Annie Kafka.
Each household, notified by SMS of the distribution, can fill the trunk of their vehicle once, “vulnerable families obviously having priority”, according to her.
– Atmospheric pollution –
In September, the town hall of Zografou, another municipality in Athens, also distributed wood from the pruning of trees in the neighborhood and from nearby Mount Ymette.
“The demand from the inhabitants was impressive”, also assures Dimosthenis Bouloukos, one of the deputies.
But the town hall of Athens, a densely populated capital where pollution problems are recurrent, did not follow the initiative precisely because of environmental concerns.
“Wood heating promotes air pollution, especially in large cities like Athens, which suffers from nitrogen oxide emissions,” said Petros Varelidis, secretary general at the Ministry of the Environment and Energy.
During the financial wreckage of Greece (2008-2018), many inhabitants, taken by the throat, had resorted to heating with wood. Many buildings weren’t even heated anymore because they couldn’t pay the fuel bills.
Consequence: the main cities of the country had found themselves enveloped in a thick fog, a sign of atmospheric pollution.
In Glyfada, residents say they are aware of the environmental dangers but the economic situation forces them to use wood heating.
It is “a kind of recycling although it can be harmful (…) but for this year, it is justified”, slice Yiannis Dimitrakopoulos.
