WIRED Magazine: How to Fix a Burning Issue
We all need to eat. But what if home cooking endangered your family’s health every day? That’s the case for almost half the population of the planet.
“Globally, three billion people rely on solid fuels to cook, causing serious environmental and health impacts that disproportionately affect women and children,” says Radha Muthiah, CEO of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves. “According to the World Health Organization, household air pollution from cooking kills over four million people every year and sickens millions more.”
To tackle this vast challenge, the Alliance was launched in 2010 by the United Nations Foundation, the US State Department, and Shell, along with 16 other partners. The public-private partnership aims to achieve largescale behavioural change by creating a market for clean cookstoves and fuels, and enable 100 million households to adopt clean and efficient cooking stoves and fuels by 2020.
“We’re stimulating demand through awareness building and behaviour change, and strengthening supply by developing a pipeline of businesses to supply products that customers value at affordable prices,” says Muthiah.
One such business is New York City startup BioLite. In 2006, Alec Drummond and Jonathan Cedar were working as designers for Smart Design, a consumer product development firm. They were both avid campers, but hated carrying gas canisters on the trail, so Drummond began trying to design a clean, efficient wood stove. He realised that by integrating a fan into the combustion system, the stove could burn wood almost as cleanly as gas. Cedar brought his engineering background to the table and the two completed the first prototype BioLite CampStove in May 2008.
To read the full article from WIRED Magazine click: How to Fix a Burning Issue