The BBC reports that a solar-powered cooker has won a major international competition.
A cheap solar cooker has won first prize in a contest for green ideas.
The Kyoto Box is made from cardboard and can be used for sterilising water or boiling or baking food.
The Kenyan-based inventor hopes it can make solar cooking widespread in the developing world, supplanting the use of wood which is driving deforestation.
Organised by Forum for the Future, the sustainable development charity founded by Jonathan Porritt, the competition aims to support concepts that have "moved off the drawing board and demonstrated their feasibility" for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but have not gained corporate backing.
"The Kyoto Box has the potential to transform millions of lives and is a model of scalable, sustainable innovation," said Peter Madden, the forum's chief executive.
It is made from two cardboard boxes, which use reflective foil and black paint to maximise absorption of solar energy.
Covering the cooking pot with a transparent cover retains heat and water, and temperatures inside the pot can reach at least 80C.
As many as two billion people in the world use firewood as their primary fuel.
The idea of cooking using the Sun's rays has been around for centuries, and a number of organisations including Solar Cookers International are already supporting their manufacture and distribution in the developing world.
Reducing reliance on firewood reduces deforestation, but also improves the health and wellbeing of villagers who do not have to trek for miles collecting the increasingly scarce wood nor spend hours inhaling wood smoke, a major cause of respiratory disease.
What impressed the judges about the Kyoto Box was the potential for production to be scaled up significantly in a number of developing countries.
"It's really the mass manufacturing aspect," said Jon Bohmer, who founded the company Kyoto Energy in Kenya.
"We can take existing factories like cardboard factories and begin to make thousands and thousands of the cookers each month," he told BBC News.
There's more at the link.
Most ingenious! I wouldn't have thought it could get that hot inside, but it does, and that promises to have all sorts of benefits. Well done to the inventors!
Peter
4 comments:
In Saudi Arabia in October '90, we cooked MREs by tossing them out on the hot sand.... if you left some of the more liquid entrees (like Chicken ala King) out to long, the foil pouch would swell to bursting........
I have cooked Christmas Dinner, Cornish game hens and sweet potatoes, in a solar cooker in Albuquerque on a day when the ambient temperature was in the 20's and there was snow on the ground.
Yes, my cooker was a bit more sophisticated than the ones described here, with an insulated box and highly polished reflectors, but for most conditions a simple cardboard box/aluminum foil cooker will do a good job.
The introduction of simple solar cookers has led to a reduction of rapes in some refugee camps since the women don't need to wander away from safety to secure cooking fuel.
If this is being touted for use by 3rd world tropical countries, I wonder what their solution would be during monsoon?
That aside, I remember seeing, a couple of decades ago, adverts for a solar-powered cigarette/emergency lighter. It had a holder for the cigarette. In emergencies, you would substitute tinder for the cig.
I wonder how well that worked.
Lets see, 1948, 1949, something on that order, one of the popular camping mags gave plans for a solar cooker that consisted of a bent piece of aluminum sheet. At the time Army Surplus Stores were working alive with the stuff and any tin shop would put a 90 degree bend in the middle for you. The food to be heated went near the bend, and the sheet was adjusted for maximum brightness at the food.
It worked well enough to bake canned biscuits in Texas, and scratch built cookies in North Dakota. Today, a foil coated piece of cardboard would do the same thing - in clear and dry weather. But it's never clear or dry when I get to go camping.
Stranger
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