Toby Tyler can still hear his son William’s scream. “That will never, ever leave us,” he says, speaking on a video call from the family home in Stockport, Greater Manchester. “But we didn’t understand what had happened. We thought he’d stood on something that had gone into his foot. It was only when he got to us and we grabbed him that we could see his foot completely stripped – all the skin had gone.”
It was 2020, in a break between lockdowns, and the Tyler family – Toby and Claire, their kids Lily and William, who was nine at the time – had gone to the beach at Formby. “There was another family who’d brought a disposable barbecue which they’d used on the sand in the morning. The whole unit had cooled, so they had moved it because they were worried about the kids standing on it, mainly because it was sharp.” You know the type: foil tray full of charcoal, topped with a mesh grill.
The sand had cooled at the surface in the wind. “But dry sand is an extraordinary insulator. The heat had penetrated down into the sand, so even a couple of hours later when William ran though and his feet sunk in, it was still 400-500C. It enveloped his feet; the worst burns were actually on top.”
The sea was miles out, so they poured the water they had on William’s feet, then Toby put him on his shoulders and ran for 20 minutes over the dunes to the car. “That was the most horrific time – I’ve got William on my shoulders, bouncing up and down, clinging to my head, with his feet just there, and he’s just in such extraordinary pain.”
They rushed him to the nearest hospital, in Ormskirk, and then he was transferred to the Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital, which has a burns unit. The burns were so bad they took skin from his thigh to graft on to one of his feet, and kept him in for eight days. He continued to go in for regular treatment at both the burns unit and the psychosocial support unit. Five years on, William is still under their care. There might be another operation; the scars are permanent.
A year after the accident William, who has autism and suffers from anxiety, wanted to do something to raise awareness of the danger posed by disposable barbecues. He did a fundraising event that involved going back to Formby beach and doing a sponsored walk, and ended up raising nearly £9,000 for the burns unit that treated him. Toby started a petition to get disposable barbecues banned, which got over 27,000 signatures but failed to change the law. “While there are no plans to introduce a blanket ban on disposable barbecues, the government is taking actions to keep people safe,” was the (previous) government’s response.
And yet, accidents continue to happen. Earlier this month, at Murlough beach in County Down, a young girl suffered burns to her feet after walking on sand that had a still-hot barbecue buried underneath. The local coastguard warned of the dangers on Facebook, urging beach-goers not to bring them. The same happened to Allison Ogden-Newton’s son. “He would have been 16 at the time – lost all the skin from the bottom of his foot, then he got an infection. It was really nasty,” she tells me.
It’s not the only reason she hates disposable barbecues. Ogden-Newton is CEO of Keep Britain Tidy. They are “the worst of all possible forms of litter”, she tells me. “They say you shouldn’t touch them for eight hours after use. Nobody who buys a so-called disposable barbecue intends to stay with it for eight hours. Even after being covered with water, they can reignite. People put sand on them to try to extinguish them, and that sand and the sand underneath the barbecue gets heated to such a degree that it can burn flesh a long time after the barbecue is over.”
The other thing people do, Ogden-Newton says, is try to dispose of them before they are cool enough. “They put barbecues that have not been extinguished in the bins and burn the bins down. It is common on beaches and other places that we desperately need not to be littered.” Again, earlier this month, firefighters were called to a blaze caused by a smouldering disposable barbecue left in a bin in the Kent town of Ramsgate.
In a growing list, the fire risk is probably the biggest black mark against the disposable barbecue’s name, leaving actual big black marks burnt into the landscape. Ogden-Newton mentions a couple of large fires believed to have been started by disposable barbecues. “Wareham Forest in 2020, which took millions and millions of gallons of water to put out, then the 11th century wood in Helford [Cornwall] that burned down in 2022 – we’re not going to see that again. All because we allow people to light these things wherever they so chose. It is staggering to me that you can go into a beautiful place that’s been standing there for a millennium and light something that you cannot possibly safely manage.”
Earlier this month, Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service (LFRS) posted, on Facebook, pictures of moorland fires started by disposable barbecues. And a warning: “A disposable BBQ might look harmless, but when placed directly on the ground it scorches the surface and starts a smouldering fire underground. It might seem out when you leave, but the heat can linger below the surface.” Pack a picnic instead, says LFRS.
In Scotland, in the Great Trossachs forest, an area of precious native woodland was destroyed by fire this month. The cause? Nick Hall, head of health and safety of the Woodland Trust, which manages the forest, sends me a picture. On the blackened ground, among the charred scrub: the inevitable aluminium tray.
A fire like that destroys fauna as well as flora. “Anything that lives on the ground that can’t outrun the fire – and that’s most things, because fire spreads very quickly,” says Hall. “So it is terrible for things like lizards and amphibians, insects, rodents, you name it. And, especially, ground-nesting birds.
“Using one in your own home, or on a hard surface, that’s fine,” Hall tells me (he doesn’t mean actually inside the home, because that would probably give you carbon monoxide poisoning). “But they’re too portable, too easy to carry into places you shouldn’t. Taking them out into the countryside, which is probably where they are most used, they pose a really significant risk, especially at times like this when we’re on high alert for wildfires. We’ve had a very dry spring. Fire and rescue services are worried about water shortages in reservoirs. So the idea you can take a big source of ignition into the countryside and use it, I think, is inherently dangerous.”
Hall says a big fire, especially on moorland and drained peat, is difficult to contain and harder to put out. He points to the 2018 Winter Hill fire in Lancashire: “We couldn’t put it out – we had to wait for autumn and enough rainfall to soak into the peat. I think it burned for 46 days in total.”
The Woodland Trust doesn’t have the power to ban barbecues on its sites, Hall explains, “but if someone is posing a public safety risk, then we call the police and have them intervene. And we have worked with local retailers previously, asking them to stop selling disposable barbecues on the edge of our estate.”
Several local authorities have implemented bans in parks and on beaches through public spaces protection orders. Hall would like to see them banned outright, as would London’s fire chief, Andy Roe, who called for a total ban after one of the service’s busiest ever weeks in July 2022.
Aldi and Waitrose stopped selling disposables in 2022, because of the detrimental impact they have on the environment. Some supermarkets don’t sell them during periods of dry weather.
I find a disposable barbecue in Sainsbury’s – cooks for eight to 10 people, it says, mine for £6. Yes, I’m afraid that in the name of journalism I need to try one out for the first family barbie of the year. We do actually have a non-disposable one (the sort that looks like a UFO on a tripod), but after a winter spent not in the shed but in the hedge, it is looking a little sorry for itself – rusty and full of snails.
And how much damage can we do at home? I find a couple of bricks to lift it off the “lawn”, and put a match to the lighting sheet, the paper that lies on top of the charcoal. A disposable barbecue can smell like a fire at a petrochemical plant at this stage, because of the flammable accelerant the paper is soaked in. But this one doesn’t smell too bad – it’s wax paper. In fact, the labelling is keen to point out that the whole thing is minimising its environmental impact: made in the UK, sustainable charcoal, recyclable.
Chicken – thighs marinated in a tikka masala paste and yoghurt – will take the longest to cook, so that goes on first. Eight thighs pretty much take up the whole grill, so it will have to be dinner in stages. In the UFO barbecue, there are different areas – very hot in the middle over the piled-up charcoal, less so round the outside – and I can move things around. There’s a lid; I can slow things down, turn it into an oven. I’m in control. On a disposable there’s none of that – just a grill very close to a thin layer of charcoal. Ready to cook after 20 minutes, good to cook on for maybe another 30, after which it becomes increasingly useless.
It soon becomes clear that not only will the flames not last for the halloumi and veggies, but even the chicken is not going to cook through. Charred on the outside, raw in the middle. There’s a horrible irony in that – that a device so adept at burning human flesh, not to mention causing fires that incinerate nests full of wild birds, is so useless at cooking a piece of chicken.
We have the advantage of not being at the beach but at home, so off comes the chicken, into a dish and into the oven. On to the grill go the halloumi and courgettes. Against the odds – some might say heroically – I have saved dinner. But the victory is a hollow one, the halloumi and courgettes ending up more par-grilled than chargrilled. Followed, half an hour later, by a kind of chicken tikka casserole, served with flat bread done in the toaster. Yet another black mark: disposable barbecues are rubbish at barbecuing.
Now to dispose of it. Again, being at home makes things easier. I can pour cold water on it, let it cool down overnight, then dismantle it, take the grill and tray to the recycling centre, the shrinkwrap to the soft plastic recycling at the supermarket, put the cardboard in the paper bin, tip the ashes into the garden etc … Realistically though, are people going to do that? Of the estimated one million-plus disposables sold in the UK each year, the vast majority are going straight to landfill.
Ogden-Newton also has concerns about what goes into them. “The majority are made in China, and we don’t know an awful lot about their composition. We do know that mangroves have sometimes been used to create the charcoal. So you’ve got ancient mangroves being burned to create charcoal which is covered in flammable gel and put into these nasty pieces of tin, so people can take them wherever they so choose and potentially put our environment at risk, harm our children … They break your heart on every conceivable level.” It turns out, from the small print on the one I got, that the charcoal comes from Namibia.
Ogden-Newton has some idea why Keep Britain Tidy’s #BanTheFlamingThings campaign didn’t achieve its goal. “We’re very cynical about the so-called nanny state, but that has allowed us to put our most valuable environmental assets at risk because we don’t want to be seen to be telling people what to do.”
William Tyler’s dad, Toby, agrees. “Politically, banning stuff is something everybody wants to avoid.” His own message, though, is clear: “Don’t sell them, don’t buy them, don’t use them.”
I won’t – I’m totally sold. Or rather, never sold to again, I promise. I’m not a big fan of banning things, either, but this one’s a no-brainer. The UFO’s coming back, descaled and desnailed.
Wait, though. How much greener is the non-disposable variety? Burning charcoal releases pollutants – including carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, particulate matter and trace metals – into the air. Scientists at Sheffield University calculated that a typical summer barbecue for four people releases more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than an 80-mile car journey.
Maybe I can limit the damage. A gas barbecue’s carbon footprint is only about a third that of a charcoal one; as well as the production and burning of carbon, the Sheffield research also takes into account food production, so sweetcorn from the allotment is going to have less environmental impact than beef burgers. I’m thinking of sustainable seafood and a glass of rosé – a blanket barbecue ban is not something I’m quite ready for yet. It doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it: put another shrimp in the air fryer?
