Affordable biomass stoves fight pollution in India

Indoor air pollution is a major cause of death for people in developing countries due to the inefficiency and uncleanly burning of indoor stoves. Indoor pollution-related deaths claim the lives of 1.5 million people a year, mainly women and children. It's easy to imagine someone keeling over after breathing in all that smoke and the yuck that's in it.

Envirofit, a U.S. nonprofit focused on engineering, has partnered with UK charity Shell Foundation to design and build affordable clean-burning biomass stoves to protect against indoor air pollution, starting in India.

The newly designed stoves reduce harmful emissions by as much as 80% -- a significant percentage that will go a long way to improving not only air quality, but the quality of life of people who use the stoves. They’re less expensive to run because they use half the fuel of traditional stoves, while still using the same sources of fuel such as wood, crop waste, and animal dung that the users typically burn. And the stoves have an added perk of speeding cooking time up by as much as 40%, which I'm sure is helpful to harried mothers.

Cultural relativism was taken into consideration, with the new stoves adhering to the unique cooking methods of Indian women. The team will move on to other areas including Africa and Central and South America, designing clean-burning stoves to fit the local lifestyles.

Envirofit as an organization goes beyond just stoves -- it's fighting pollution in developing countries through fixing up two-stroke engines. It’s working on cost-effectively retrofitting of emissions-spewing, two-stroke engines with direct injection technology. Envirofit is starting up this endeavor in the Philippines.

Via GoodCleanTech, Envirofit