Four ways to make your BBQ grill better for your health and the environment this summer

Charcoal is the wild west. Those black, lumpy chunks people throw into their backyard barbecue grills all look more or less the same. What’s inside the bag often is not.

To be sure, most charcoal in the United States is made mostly of wood, generally scraps and sawdust from mills or manufacturing.

But without much in the way of mandatory disclosure, the $1.5 billion international trade is anything but transparent.

Studies around the world have discovered some unsavory things packed into charcoal briquettes, including heavy metals. And charcoal production is a prime culprit behind deforestation in many tropical countries. Brazil, the world’s largest charcoal producer, along with Nigeria, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo, clears forest land for wood plantations.

Here in the United States, most charcoal brands are aboveboard. And you don’t need to sweat your grill’s greenhouse gas emissions. They’re minuscule. Grills and barbecues in the United States generate just 0.0003% of overall annual emissions. What you put on the grill is more important than how you fire it up: Meat – at least how most of it is raised today – drives 57% of all food production emissions, much of that from beef.

Still, is there a better way to barbecue for you and the climate? Yes. From fancy electric kettle grills to restoring cheetah habitat with African acacia charcoal, you have options.

Here’s how to make a good grill choice.

The science of perfect smoke

Barbecue, says physicist Greg Blonder, is all about the smoke. And almost everyone gets it wrong.

Blonder, now a visiting researcher at Boston University, brings science to the world of barbecue. “I started 20 years ago in food science partly because the advice in cookbooks was wrong,” he says. “It violated thermodynamics or there was no evidence behind the assertions. The whole field is weakly based on reality. It was a mosh pit of bad ideas.”

The mechanical engineer with a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard advises competitive pitmasters and co-authored the book Meathead: The Science of Great Barbecue and Grilling.

The point of cooking over charcoal, Blonder says, is to create the right kind of smoke to impart the signature flavor. Too cold, and off flavors from acids, tars and bitter creosols can infuse the food. Too hot, and coals produce heat without flavor.

And if you’re planning to slather ribs with store-bought sauce or pile burgers high with mustard, ketchup, onions and other ingredients, that might be delicious but you don’t need the smoke. “There’s no flavor left of the meat,” he says. “You can’t tell you used any wood. It’s just not possible.”

The best smoke flavor, he estimates, is emitted by hardwood embers between 650 and 750 degrees Fahrenheit. The wood acts as a spice. “Barbecue is, by most definitions, cooking low and slow and indirectly off the heat,” says Blonder. “A uniformly glowing, well-vented wood fire is the goal.”

Lump hardwood is humanity’s original charcoal, dating back to the species’ early days. The most primitive production method – covering wood under an earthen mound, and lighting it on fire with little oxygen – is still in use today.

Yet charcoal need not come from trees. It is flammable carbon: plant or organic matter heated in a low-oxygen environment. The process drives out moisture and organic compounds. What’s left behind is a dry, carbon-rich fuel that burns hotter and longer than wood.

Almost any organic matter will suffice. Sawdust, hay, coconut shells, bones, sugar olive pits, nutshells and much more can be turned into charcoal.

Should I use briquettes?

If you want smoke, briquettes won’t do it. These pressed blocks of charred wood, sawdust and binders emerged from auto manufacturing. In the early 1900s, Henry Ford repurposed the wood scraps and sawdust pouring off his company’s assembly lines. They burn hot and uniformly, earning a loyal following among backyard grillers and professional cooks.

Along with imparting zero flavor – other than gasoline, when the briquettes are soaked in lighter fluid – they are not as clean or convenient as electric or propane.

This summer, you don’t need to choose between traditional lump charcoal and briquettes. Here’s a quick review of the most interesting options:

The ecological choice: Good Charcoal Co.

In Namibia, droughts and poor land management have turned millions of hectares of grasslands into impenetrable thickets of thorny trees and bushes, particularly acacia. This dense hardwood plagues African farmers and wildlife – including cheetahs, which can be blinded by the underbrush as they hunt.

It also happens to make an ideal charcoal. Ben Jablonski, founder and chief executive of Good Charcoal Co., turned it into a product.

His company partners with local farmers and ranchers who remove the acacia, char it in metal drums and ship it to the United States and Europe. The company aims to restore grasslands for wildlife by clearing millions of hectares of acacia. Since launching in June 2021, the charcoal maker, newly certified by the Forest Stewardship Council for responsible land management, says sales have soared more than tenfold at retailers like Home Depot, Sam’s Club, Target and Kroger.

How does it compare to oak and hickory? I asked Jonathan Rosenberg, the general manager at Supperland in Charlotte, which feeds more than 250 people a day from a 14-foot wood-fired grill. “We want really controlled heat sources,” he says “We don’t use briquettes, which have a lot of additives.”

While Rosenberg usually uses oak charcoal, he recently began supplementing with Good Charcoal’s lump acacia hardwood. “We can tell it burns hotter even than our great standard stuff,” he says, and it imparts a flavor similar to oak and hickory charcoal.

The convenient choice: Propane

For Blonder, the perfect balance of convenience and taste is achieved with a gas grill. Burning gas has no flavor, but simply wrapping wood chips in foil on the grill gives food the same smoky essence associated with a barbecue – and a much faster cleanup.

How does it fare climate-wise? Propane, or natural gas, generates roughly three times fewer carbon emissions per unit of energy than run-of-the mill charcoal. But it is still a nonrenewable fossil fuel. And these estimates don’t account for methane, a potent greenhouse gas, leaked as propane gets refined and transported, or the environmental benefits of a responsibly made product such as Good Charcoal.

But for ease of use, it’s hard to beat.

The plug-and-play option: Electric grills

Electric grills have come into their own as an easy, clean and high-performing alternative to open flame. The portable Weber Q 1400 electric grill is one of the most popular, although there are many models available ranging in price from $100 to $300.

Originally popular for apartment patios where gas or charcoal grills are prohibited, the category has expanded to include everything from griddles to full-scale kettle-style grills capable of cooking more than a dozen burgers at a time. Depending on your space – and your state’s electricity mix – it could be the way to go for ease, convenience and environmental benefits.

The fossil-fuel- free option: Solar cooker

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For the adventurous among you, there are solar ovens. These are not grills, but with them you can cook almost anything that you might prepare on a kitchen range outdoors.

Solar Cookers International says there are more than 4 million solar cookers around the world.

These simple devices trap the sun’s heat energy. Sunlight passes through clear glass or plastic, strikes a dark surface and converts to long-wave infrared radiation. This heat remains trapped, raising temperatures above 250 degrees, higher than what it takes to boil water. It’s the same phenomenon that heats up your car on a sunny day – and the planet under our blanket of greenhouse gases.

You can cook with solar ovens all summer long, from Boston to Miami. Things take a little longer to cook, but you can do everything except deep-frying.

“Cooking with sunshine is like having an unplugged Crock-Pot in your backyard,” says Lorraine Anderson, author of Slow Cook Solar: Sun-Baked Summer Meals Good for People and Planet. “I cook most of my summer meals with sunshine … The food is flavorful, and it never burns.”