Thijs Westerbeek gets a demonstration of a new wood stove from the Philips Reseach lab that aims to cut the huge number of deaths due to indoor air pollution - smoke from cooking and heating fires. Listen to the radio programme here
From the Radio Netherlands Worldwide website:
More than three billion people depend on solid fuels, such as coal, wood and even dung, for their cooking and heating. These are usually burnt on traditional stoves or open fires, which make a great deal of health damaging smoke, or indoor air pollution. It's usually the women and children who suffer first. Cooking is predominantly women's work and if they have a baby on their back as they cook, the child gets a dose of smoke too.
In Kenya, many women use a three-stone fire, the worst offender, where burning wood produces tiny particles of soot that can clog and irritate the bronchial pathways in the lungs. The carbon monoxide and other poisonous gases they have to breathe are estimated to cause 2.7 percent of the global burden of disease. That's millions of people who die young of preventable respiratory diseases, all because of dirty smoke.
Solutions
Chimneys are an obvious solution, somewhere for the smoke to escape rather than circulating around the dwelling. In practice, they can be more of a problem. They are tricky to construct, often leak or clog up and remove valuable heat with the smoke. As Dr Paul van der Sluis from the Philips Research lab points out, it takes a man to build a chimney, but it's women who'd benefit most from one.
Solar stoves are a great help in hot countries, particularly in refugee camps where wood is a scarce resource and collecting it leaves women vulnerable to assault. But solar stoves require sunshine and lots of it, so cooking has to be done outdoors, and only during daylight hours.
More efficient stoves are also a solution. The Philips lab's wood burning stove even produces a little surplus electricity, enough to run a radio, charge your mobile phone or run a small lamp in the evenings. But technology comes at a price. People use stones and wood for a reason. It's free. So improving indoor air quality for millions of people is as much about making these innovations affordable as it is about the technological advances themselves.
|
