This saved 400,000 lives per year from lower exposure to 2.5-micron air pollution. Fine-particle pollution causes premature death in people with lung or heart disease and increases sickness. China will continue to reduce exposure to fine particulate matter by 63 percent. This will prevent an additional 510,000 premature deaths.
Most of the household particulate pollution reduction seen in China was a result of a cookstove technology shift. Cleaner heating helped but heating is not used every day while people cook every day.
China has a goal is to increase the fraction of clean heating in northern China to 70 percent by 2021.
The people who have upgraded their cookstoves and heating appliances to cleaner-burning fuels have done so in areas where the switch was relatively easy to make. Rural and low-income urban areas will need government infrastructure to switch to cleaner cooking and cleaner heating. China will build natural-gas pipeline networks and an upgrade of terminal power grid.
Cleaner burning charcoal and stoves can reduce indoor air pollution by 90-95%.
Africa Shifting to Cleaner Charcoal Cooking
Charcoal is made from wood. Standard wood is burned in a low oxygen environment. The burning process removes water, methane, hydrogen, and tar from the wood. The result is small chunks of “char” that are almost pure carbon.
Charcoal consumption is a massive threat to the environment and human health. Deforestation is a huge problem across Africa. Areas in South Africa could fully exhaust their fuelwood reserves by 2020. Kenya loses 10.3 million tons of wood from its forests every year. Kenya has an 0.3% annual deforestation rate.
Diseases caused by smoke from open fires and stoves claim 4.3 million lives every year. This is more than AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined.
Wood and charcoal cooking wastes time. It takes 0.8–1.3 hours to cook and 0.3–0.4 hours to clean each day per urban households and 4+ hours for rural wood collectors.
Africa’s demand for charcoal is likely to double or triple by 2050, according to the United Nations Environment Program.
Clean Briquette Companies
Lumbrick is a social enterprise which leverages innovative technology developed at McGill University to transform organic waste into clean cooking fuel.
Eco-Charcoal
Eco-Charcoal makes safe, clean, healthy briquettes from pruned branches which are dried, carbonized and mixed with a natural binder. This ensures a quick regrowth of the pruned trees and helps with climate change mitigation. These briquettes have low-carbon emissions. The company is selling in Nairobi its 5kg bags for 700 Kenyan shillings (~7$).
Burn Cookstove
Burn is a cookstove manufacturer that produces the market leading “Jikokoa” stove. Burn targets the upper segment of the cookstove market. The stoves are priced at $40–50, which is about ten times higher than a regular stove. It costs a lot less to operate a Burn stove. Its technology reduces fuel consumption and cooking time by almost 50%. Burn enables its customers to inhale less smoke.
Toyola Energy
Toyola Energy is a small stove business in Ghana. They have sold over 150,000 charcoal stoves that are cooking meals for around 1 million low-income people in the country.
It applies simple and readily available materials like scrap metal and clay to produce traditional charcoal stoves that use 30 percent less charcoal than ordinary stoves,
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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The temperature limitation for a wood fire is how much volitile are present (moisture, lignin, etc.) Kiln dried wood burns with more heat than common seasoned firewood. Air restricted pyrolysis treated wood (charcoal) burns very hot, similar to anthracite coal if given sufficient air flow. The syngas produced of a commercial charcoal making process may be consumed in fueling the wood roasting oven.
Try eating uncooked beans and report back on the consequences, if up to doing so. Many other common foods have a toxic component neutralized by the heat of cooking.
Charcoal won’t work in highrise apartments either. But you’re right, northern China isn’t the ideal place for solar ovens.
I donate money to an organization that distributes solar ovens in Haiti and Dominican Republic, but it’s still a small operation. The families that receive the ovens seem to like them.
Raw meats are generally a bad idea on principle. “raw” sushi is not actually raw, it’s been flash frozen at least once, which kills the parasites. Salted meats by definition are not raw, and the curing process usually kills off active bacteria and parasites. Modern livestock management and preparation has reduced natural dangers to the extent that some meat could be eaten raw with a reduced risk, but that’s still playing with fire.
Cured meats was a big game changer in terms of general human health but that was ages ago. It’s only recently that people have gotten it into their skulls that raw food is OK, and their ignorance is largely protected by a modern cold chain logistics platform and improved food preparation/management.
With that recent thing on wombat feces being cubic, I wonder what the burn profile would be compared to pelletized style feces…
I was thinking that charcoal is cheaper in my local, 1st world, huge margin, supermarket. $7 charcoal is not even remotely cheap.
Solar stoves are still a thing. But only really work in bright, sunny, outdoor locations.
Big, polluted, cities with highrise apartments in Northern Chinese winter is not going to work.
Food cooking was invented because there are a lot of advantages:
It’s certainly POSSIBLE to eat all your food raw, but to do so safely requires access to fresh, clean, safe ingredients and preparation time. Which is not the case for a poorly paid (by western standards) Asian city dweller.
Also, are you expecting them to go without tea?
The smoke rises into the sky and is blown far away across the Pacific to California. And nobody lives in California (at least nobody that anyone else cares about) so it is all good.
When you burn the wood to create charcoal, what happens to that smoke?
You could operate a rocket stove on dried goat poo. The price is right for that stuff, and it comes in nice uniform pellets.
There’s something called a “rocket stove” that is popular with the alternative heating community. Relatively little wood is burned in a downdraft manner, and the combustion products are fully burned in a turbulent flow, inside a refractory tube. In some cases combustion, or secondary combustion air is preheated.
You can build one of these things with an empty steel drum, some refractory brick(fire brick), and cob(clay, sand, and straw). You can both cook, and heat a small home in this manner. Usually, the combustion products are used to heat a large amount of stone, or cob in the shape of a bench near a wall. It’s sort of a poor man’s masonry stove. You could also heat water by running a tube through the cob, and placing a reservoir above the level of the tubing to use the thermosiphon effect. In a tropical setting you could exhaust the combustion products directly outside, after heating the cook surface.
There are lots of videos online at youtube. Search “rocket stove mass heater” or some combination of those words.
LOL! Millennial Hipster “Clean” Carbon. *wipes tears from eyes*
Maybe the solution to the problem is to not cook the food. Eat raw. Or do what the Koreans and the Japanese do. Cut the meat in thin strips and use a hot pot. or cut the meat in thin strips, beat it, spice it, salt and dry it and eat it raw.
What ever happened to solar stoves?
The problem here is as obvious as the nose on the reporter’s face.
Cost.
$7/kg for prettily packaged eco-charcoal is a FORTUNE in (in this case) Kenyan income terms. Might as well make the things from silver nuggets.
If it really were a thing worth the hubbub, the charcoal bags would be netted in cheap plastic mesh, labelled with a single-color spray painted label. If any. Cheap. Affordable. Low profit margin.
And that, goats, is what annoys me about most of these Third World Solutions. Almost inevitably they’re “for-show” evolutions. Not revolutions. Not gritty, low cost, impoverished-level answers to the persistant problems. Just show off tech that the UN can get behind, that makes the News, that gives plenty of Diplomaticic Reception narrative to babble about.
Really, Just saying,
GoatGuy
It would be interesting if there was a chinese central committee directive to reduce/eliminate soft coal usage. Cylinders of coal that has been pressed with a binder, but otherwise not upgraded in terms of heating value. This is cheap, low end coal, made by ram pressing soft coal into a mold usually, sometimes even without a binder. We’re talking backyard production here, nothing fancy.
Getting the general populace to switch to upgraded fuels would push things in interesting directions, such as effectively supporting a coal-to-liquids/coal-to-gas refinery industry. You can generate liquid transportation fuels and methane via fisher-tropsch and Sasol processes, so you can source gasoline and methane (methane being used in both tanked applications like LPG where there is no existing gas distribution pipeline system to homes, and conventional town gas networks).
Or you might see pricing shift usage patterns. There was a point where soft coal was so undesirable that the cost of transport to many domestic urban areas exceeded sellable price, leading to soft coal piling up at mines. Some rather crafty Bitcoin miners took advantage of this to locally generate power at the mines using that coal, and not sending power to the grid, so it was effectively unregulated power production. Converting soft coal to bitcoin was a somewhat rational choice in those circumstances…
When you burn the wood to create charcoal, what happens to that smoke?
You could operate a rocket stove on dried goat poo. The price is right for that stuff, and it comes in nice uniform pellets.
There’s something called a “rocket stove” that is popular with the alternative heating community. Relatively little wood is burned in a downdraft manner, and the combustion products are fully burned in a turbulent flow, inside a refractory tube. In some cases combustion, or secondary combustion air is preheated.
You can build one of these things with an empty steel drum, some refractory brick(fire brick), and cob(clay, sand, and straw). You can both cook, and heat a small home in this manner. Usually, the combustion products are used to heat a large amount of stone, or cob in the shape of a bench near a wall. It’s sort of a poor man’s masonry stove. You could also heat water by running a tube through the cob, and placing a reservoir above the level of the tubing to use the thermosiphon effect. In a tropical setting you could exhaust the combustion products directly outside, after heating the cook surface.
There are lots of videos online at youtube. Search “rocket stove mass heater” or some combination of those words.
LOL! Millennial Hipster “Clean” Carbon. *wipes tears from eyes*
Maybe the solution to the problem is to not cook the food. Eat raw. Or do what the Koreans and the Japanese do. Cut the meat in thin strips and use a hot pot. or cut the meat in thin strips, beat it, spice it, salt and dry it and eat it raw.
What ever happened to solar stoves?
The problem here is as obvious as the nose on the reporter’s face.
Cost.
$7/kg for prettily packaged eco-charcoal is a FORTUNE in (in this case) Kenyan income terms. Might as well make the things from silver nuggets.
If it really were a thing worth the hubbub, the charcoal bags would be netted in cheap plastic mesh, labelled with a single-color spray painted label. If any. Cheap. Affordable. Low profit margin.
And that, goats, is what annoys me about most of these Third World Solutions. Almost inevitably they’re “for-show” evolutions. Not revolutions. Not gritty, low cost, impoverished-level answers to the persistant problems. Just show off tech that the UN can get behind, that makes the News, that gives plenty of Diplomaticic Reception narrative to babble about.
Really, Just saying,
GoatGuy