Clean cookstoves as covered by National Public Radio in the United States.
NPR/February 9th, 2011
By Martin Kaste
Almost half the world still cooks its food with solid fuels, such as wood and charcoal.
The results are deforestation and black carbon, which contributes to global warming. And smoke-related disease kills an estimated 1.6 million people a year.
In war zones, the daily hunt for firewood can present families with terrible dilemmas, says Veronique Barbelet of the World Food Programme.
“You hear women in northern Uganda and places like that telling you, ‘My choice is between going out there and collecting firewood and being raped, or for my husband to go out and get killed, and I would rather go and get raped,’ ” she says.
For these and other reasons, the World Food Programme has turned to a small nonprofit organization called Aprovecho.
In a rustic research center near the railroad tracks in Cottage Grove, Ore., Aprovecho builds stoves that use minimal amounts of wood, don’t release much smoke — and are cheap enough for the Third World.
‘We Don’t Know How Fire Works’
Making the stoves is no simple task, says Damon Ogle, a retired mining engineer. He helped build a new large stove that the World Food Programme plans to deploy in refugee camps and schools in Africa.
At its lab, Aprovecho teaches people how to test the efficiency and emissions of wood stoves.
“Our ancestors have been making fires for probably 400,000 years,” Ogle says. “And we still don’t know how fire works.”
But Ogle knows more than most. The stove he helped build can cook rice for 20 people with two fistfuls of sticks — up to 90 percent less wood than required by a traditional cooking fire.
“Rocket science is very simple and straightforward compared to what’s going on in your fireplace or inside one of these wood-burning stoves,” he says.
The stove is made from a steel 55-gallon drum, but that belies the precision engineering of what’s inside. A well-insulated combustion chamber made out of a special steel alloy concentrates the fire of just a few sticks of wood. The combustion is more complete than what you’d get in an open fire, burning the particles that usually become smoke. The hot gases are directed around the cookpot. As the water boils, the stove’s metal skin and stovepipe barely get warm, an indication of how little heat is wasted.
Read & listen to the entire story on the NPR website (5min 18sec).
(Photo: Martin Kaste/NPR)
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