TEDTalks: Amy Smith, Feb 2006
The number one killer of children under the age of 5 is the inhalation from indoor cooking fires. A lot of effort has been put into looking for alternatives to charcoal as cooking fuels. The use of wood charcoal not only creates health risks due to inhalation of heavy smoke, but also leads to environmental degradation, in terms of destabilisation of hillsides due to the heavy use of wood. Smith works through examples of MIT studies in Haiti. Bagas, a waste resource from sugar cane is processed and combined with a sticky paste derived from casava to create brickettes for cooking.
In India the most commonly used cooking fuel is cow dung, which creates very smoky fires (ie. heavy impact on health). The locally available sources of biomass were wheat and rice straw, with small amounts of cow manure as a binder. After studying optimal pressures for compression of the brickettes, a low cost press was developed for use in Haiti.
Thus, the use of agricultural waste as cooking fuels, as opposed to wood, can be not only healthier, but also environmentally sustainable. Another example was the use of corn cobs, which form ready-made charcoal briquettes.
This is also one of the incredibly rare situations where you also have economic benefits. People can make their own cooking fuel from waste products. They can generate income from this. They can save the money they were going to spend on charcoal, and they can produce excess and sell it in the market to people who aren't making their own. It's extremely rare that you don't have trade-offs between health and economics, or environment and economics.
She suggests that people below the poverty line need to be able to make new, genuine 'value' products, and that we need to work with them to give them resources and tools so that they can solve their own problems.
