Clean Cookstoves
THE CHALLENGE
More than three billion people, or half the world's population, cook in their homes using traditional fire and stoves, burning biomass fuels like wood, dung and crop waste. Day in and day out, for hours at a time, families breathe in lethal fumes from these cooking fires. Indoor Air Pollution (IAP) currently claims the lives of 1.5 million people a year worldwide, or one person every 20 seconds. Women and children make up the vast majority of these deaths due to their increased exposure in the home.
OUR SOLUTION
Independent UK charity Shell Foundation and leading US environmental nonprofit Envirofit International today announced a ground-breaking partnership that has the potential to significantly reduce the number of global deaths caused by Indoor Air Pollution (IAP) - the smoke generated by traditional fires and stoves used in developing world homes. Envirofit will be tasked with handling the scale-up and spin off of the Shell Foundation's Breathing Space program, which was founded in 2002 to achieve significant global reductions in IAP. This new partnership is part of the Foundation's mission to see 10 million clean-burning stoves sold in five countries over the next five years. The Foundation is providing Envirofit with investment and organizational support to form an independent global entity. In turn, Envirofit International, working with their technology partner Colorado State University's Engines and Energy Conversion Laboratory, will design, develop, market and distribute clean cookstoves that are engineered to emit significantly less toxic emissions and use less fuel.
For more information please see the full press release, located here