Health // Current TV

Genetic Roulette Free Screening: Vote Today!

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Biochar cookstoves boost health for people and crops

Stacey Schultz

For National Geographic News

Published January 29, 2013

Like many of her neighbors in Amubri, an indigenous community at the southern tip of Costa Rica, Gloria Torress Buitrago relied for years on a fogón for cooking. The traditional open-fire stove is common in Amubri (map), and so are the dire health effects. "It was hard to look around and just breathe without feeling the smoke burning the eyes or throat," Buitrago said. One cousin suffered from asthma, and everyone in her family was constantly tearing up from the wood fire's smoke.

Buitrago was just one of three billion people worldwide who rely on such open-fire cookstoves. A recent global health study found that the fumes from those stoves was the largest environmental health threat in the world today, killing 3.5 million people a year—more deaths than caused by malaria and HIV/AIDS combined. (See related blog post: "Cookstove Smoke Is 'Largest Environmental Threat,' Global Health Study Finds.") Cookstoves that burn cleaner can help fight this epidemic, but they can do even more than that when configured to produce biochar, a dark, fine-grained residue that can become a prized asset for rural communities.

In regions as diverse as the high mountain valleys of Costa Rica and the agricultural fields of western Kenya, biochar cookstoves are being used to simultaneously clear the air and enrich the soil. Biochar, a type of charcoal produced when biomass burns in an oxygen-free environment, can boost water and nutrients in dry, depleted soil while serving as a vehicle for burying the carbon that contributes to global warming.

Breathing Easier
Groups like Seattle, Washington-based SeaChar, the recipient of a $72,000 grant from National Geographic's Great Energy Challenge initiative, have been testing new variations on clean cookstoves. SeaChar's Estufa Finca ("Farm Stove" in Spanish) burns biomass cleanly while turning it into biochar. It's not a fancy apparatus: Fashioned from local materials, its components include a five-gallon steel paint bucket, some corrugated steel roofing material, and half of a one-gallon tomato sauce can.

Gloria Torres Buitrago's family is one of 110 households that acquired one of the stoves last year through SeaChar's Estufa Finca program in Costa Rica's Talamanca region. Buitrago says the stove has relieved not only the smoke problem in her home, but also the effort required to keep fires burning. "The time and money it takes to get wood has been reduced a lot," Buitrago said in an interview with a SeaChar staff member, who then translated and emailed her responses. "This time can be used to share with family or just do other things in the garden." (See related story: "Protecting Health and the Planet With Clean Cookstoves.")

In addition to wood, the stove burns garden debris, dried animal dung, and food material such as dried corncobs and coconut husks. A family cooking a pot of beans will use 40 percent less wood with the Estufa Finca than with an open-fire stove, said SeaChar President Art Donnelly, who designed the stove. "Those are trees you do not have to cut down."

Donnelly said tests conducted by SeaChar show a significant reduction in exposure to harmful smoke. "In laboratory testing, these stoves reduced particulate matter emissions by 92 percent and the carbon monoxide emissions by 87 percent as compared to an open cooking fire," he said in an email. "These two are the big drivers of respiratory disease."

More at the linkStacey Schultz For National Geographic News Published January 29, 2013 Like... more

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