Where There's Smoke ~

Mornings in Nicaragua: the acrid smell of smoke from cooking fires filling the air and burning the nose and throat. Some of it is wood smoke, but mostly it's something a lot less pleasant, reminiscent of burning tires. I don't know what these people are burning to cook with but it's not anything I'm happy about breathing. They probably aren't happy about it either but most probably have no choice. To eat they need to cook; to cook they need fuel; and fuel is expensive for poorer families which is the bulk of the population. Firewood is not always easy or affordable to obtain. And the forest are disappearing.

This is not a new story. We have witnessed it again and again around the world. The reasons why it can't be curbed are ones I do not yet fully know or understand. Three billion people – nearly half the world's population – still cook over open fires that spew very significant quantities of CO2 into our global atmosphere. It's only recently that there has been a dawning awareness and growing alarm of how much this is contributing to climate change. Suddenly there's a lot more interest in figuring out how to come up with and implement alternate cooking methods. And it's no surprise, at all, that already corporations are sniffing around that door, sensing the possibility of profit.

There are a lot of cooking stove projects out there, and many are focused on manufacturing and selling or supplying the stoves to people. A lesser number are helping the people who need the stoves to establish their own manufacturing businesses in their own cities and villages. Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves was founded? by Hilary Clinton and is endorsed by Julia Roberts, and has endless text on their website about meetings, conferences, establishing standards, policies, and on and on. It's mind-numbing to think of the amount of time and “energy” they are spending doing these sorts of things.

This winter I connected with a guy – a refugee – from Ethiopia, where the open fire and deforestation situation is grave. He spends virtually no time whatsoever on these sorts of things. He has started a sustainable “clean” cooking stove program, Green Energy Without Borders, as a way of helping the people in his homeland, taking the route of assisting them to establish their own manufacturing programs there. In just four years, his program has built and distributed about 120,000 stoves made from recycled, readily available materials. The stoves use compressed briquettes made from agricultural organic waste such as sugar cane stalks and corn stalks, which is converted to charcoal, mixed with a small amount of clay, and formed into specially designed briquettes that burn slow and clean. They also scavenge the fine bits of charcoal from the ground in marketplaces where charcoal made from wood has been piled for decades. Some of these “deposits” have built up for years and are quite deep.

The system is not perfect; the process of making the charcoal does create CO2. But it prevents deforestation, and it eliminates smoke during cooking. The fine particles in this smoke are the cause of millions of deaths annually, worldwide, from related health problems. I asked about carbon monoxide emissions from the stoves and he was not able to answer that; he has not had his stoves tested for that. But apparently no one has died over the past few years, so presumably this is not a significant issue. In a pinch the stoves can burn any combustible materials, and indeed people sometimes break the briquettes in half or quarters and mix them with cattle dung or other solid fuel to extend them – this does create smoke but not as much as a regular open fire. The program is supporting a local economy and fosters innovation, but it also gives away many, many stoves to those who are most in need and cannot afford to purchase one. And it is self-sustaining, without the support of large organizations filled with red tape. It's homegrown. And his stoves are the number one preferred stoves in the Adama region where they are being made.

One of the projects I will be working on in Nicaragua involves the introduction of heat boxes to help extend cooking time. The traditional diet here includes a lot of rice and beans, and the beans especially take a long time to cook, even when soaked first. Activist and musician Paul Baker Hernandez wants to start a program that will encourage and assist people in designing and building insulated heat boxes from simple materials such as cardboard, that will keep a pot of beans hot long enough to finish cooking them after a short amount of boiling, and reduce the amount of fuel needed and smoke emitted.

There are some cooking stove projects in action in Nicaragua, though Paul says he has not heard of any that are using agricultural waste to make briquettes for fuel. Perhaps one day soon Green Energy stoves can be introduced here.