Into the smokeless zone

Over two billion people – one third of the world’s population – depend on biomass as their main cooking fuel. To all intents and purposes, this means they have to burn wood to eat, literally cutting down trees to prepare breakfast, lunch or supper.

Cooking on open fires doesn’t just mean deforestation on a massive scale: it means women and children suffering from the ill-effects of filling their lungs with soot and smoke; more carbon spiralling into the atmosphere, and fewer trees to soak it up. But this dependence isn’t about to go away. For many people, there’s simply no alternative fuel available. Some can switch to bottled gas, but with the price of petroleum on the rise, it’s out of reach for most. And while eco-friendly biogas can replace wood for some [see All you need is spirituality... and slurry], there simply aren’t the cows to go round to meet everyone’s needs. Burning wood or other biomass doesn’t have to mean smoky lungs and stripped forests, though. Some of the most effective, and least publicised, energy interventions over the last two decades have involved the introduction of improved cooking stoves: ones which burn leaner and cleaner – producing more food for less wood in healthier homes. To the uninitiated, a better cookstove sounds banal to the point of boring. But to those on the receiving end, they’re life transformers. Which explains why four of this year’s Ashden Award winners have produced variations on this vital theme. All fired up...
Thirty years after Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge tore Cambodia apart, the country is facing a different kind of crisis: rampant deforestation. That’s partly due to illegal logging for the timber trade, but it’s exacerbated by the charcoal industry. Nine out of ten households in the capital, Phnom Penh, depend on charcoal for cooking fuel – and the chance of that proportion coming down any time soon is slim: for most people, there simply aren’t any affordable alternatives. Faced with this, local engineers working for French NGO GERES have redesigned the traditional Cambodian stove so that it uses around a quarter less fuel, cooks more cleanly and quickly, and lasts longer, too. It doesn’t involve any complex technology, and can be made by the same local potters who’ve been producing stoves for generations. And each new stove saves one tonne of carbon a year. The beauty of the scheme is that, once the potters have been trained up, it’s pretty much self-financing, and everyone involved benefits. The stove sells in the markets for around US$3 – compared to $1 for the old variety – with both the potters and the retailers making more money out of the deal, while the householders find that, thanks to the fuel savings, it pays for itself in a matter of months. No surprises, then, that over 110,000 have already been sold in the few years the project’s been running – an economic, as well as environmental, success story. Having made a dent in charcoal demand, GERES is shifting its focus to the supply side, with plans to harvest sustainable charcoal from community forests and ‘energy plantations’, and schemes for turning everything from charcoal dust to crop residues – all of which would otherwise go to waste – into briquettes which can be burnt in the stoves. Small enterprise, too, is at the heart of another stove scheme, across the world in Central America – in the highlands of central Mexico, to be precise. Here, many local women make a living by cooking tortillas over open fires in their homes. On the surface, it’s a fine example of rural micro-enterprise – but it’s bad news for the local environment, and the health of the women, too. With over 95% using wood as fuel, they face the familiar problems of smoky, unhealthy kitchens at home, and the destruction of forests in the surrounding hills. The government’s encouraging households to switch to bottled gas, but few can afford it. Enter the Patsaris – the latest in a series of improved stoves designed by Dr Omar Masera and his team at GIRA. This cuts wood use by up to 60% and, just as important, does away with much of the smoke and pollution produced by the traditional variety. GIRA has installed over 3,500 Patsaris, all made locally out of local materials. And it has some unlooked for advantages, too. As one user poignantly remarked: “I used to get very lonely cooking over an open wood stove, because my family did not like the smoke and kept away. Now my daughters like to help me with the cooking, because the Patsaris doesn’t make smoke.” It’s a similar story in southern Africa, where stove designers supreme, Aprovecho, have been introducing their highly fuel-efficient ‘Rocket’ stove to communities across the region, working with local stove producers from Lesotho all the way up to Uganda. The Rocket design uses an internal chimney to help ensure the best possible combustion of the fuel and its gases. It’s virtually smokeless, and has recorded dramatic savings in both wood and carbon emissions compared to traditional stoves. A single primary school in Mozambique has more than halved its expenditure on fuel wood thanks to the Rocket, and now has an additional £750 to spend on students’ educational needs. In a region blighted by drought, soil erosion and deforestation, the Rocket is a hugely valuable weapon in the battle to conserve and restore tree cover. It’s spreading fast through a commercialisation programme led by Probec (the Programme for Biomass Energy Conservation), with over 1,500 institutional varieties already produced and sold – giving a real boost to local stove makers. – MW

Less wood, more jobs Food isn’t the only thing which needs cooking, of course. Bricks need firing, too. And in rural Africa, there’s only one fuel around to feed the brick kilns – wood. In the dry lands round Mwanza, in Tanzania, wood is so thin on the ground that brick makers have been forced to fell 100-year-old mango trees to keep the fires burning. It’s an industry nearing the end of the road: either they stop using wood – or they stop making bricks. The latter’s inconceivable in a country badly needing new, low-cost housing. Fortunately, there’s a way out of the dilemma. Mwanza’s Rural Housing Programme has come up with a new design of kiln which can burn otherwise useless agricultural waste, such as rice and coffee husks and the leftovers from the cotton harvest. Over 50 have been installed by small businesses in local villages – and they’re not just saving wood. The scheme has created jobs for thousands of local people, both in brick-making and house-building, too. Now MRHP is turning its attention to tackling deforestation in other ways: training local women to produce energy-efficient cooking stoves, using local clays, which consume far less wood than the traditional variety; and planting community woodlots to help boost forest cover.

3 July 2006