Many people in developing nations use wood burning stoves indoors for cooking. Usually inefficient, the result is a big burden of time or money to obtain the wood and health problems due to indoor smoke. Using a carefully designed stove to enclose the fire and direct heat into the cooking pot, fuel consumption and pollution can be reduced dramatically.
Engineers at Colorado State University have developed stoves with simple carburettors that can cut particulate emissions by 75% and fuel consumption by half. Their design is now being commercialized by an NGO called Envirofit. It produces four models in China and India that sell for $10-80.
Ron Bills, Envirofit’s boss, hopes to sell 10m stoves worldwide by 2013. The Colorado State team, meanwhile, has devised an experimental stove that generates electricity using a thermoelectric device and powers a white light-emitting diode (LED).
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