February 2012

Aprovecho Spring Stove Camp April, 2012

25 February 2012 - 1:53pm

Aprovecho Stove Camp, April 2-5th, 2012

From Mike Hatfield:

Attached is a flyer for the week and here are some logistics for those interested.

Agenda

I will send out an updated agenda but a tentative agenda is as follows:

Stove Camp 2012

Day 1

USA

Prakti Design Lab

25 February 2012 - 12:00am

Prakti is celebrating its fourth year of existence. To date, our clean and efficient cooking stoves are impacting the life of 175,000 people in Haiti, India, and Nepal. In a few months, our stoves will be making meals for 84,000 more people in Darfur/Sudan. As we are reaching a higher level of distribution, self-funding is not enough anymore!

Some recent Prakti highlights:
• We developed clean and efficient institutional cooking stoves, which run on 'green' fuel: Briquettes made from urban waste as alternative to charcoal. We already delivered 700 of these large stoves - which will be feeding 140,000 school children, saving 10,000 tons of wood per year, and saving schools a total of $400,000 per year in charcoal cost. This is the best institutional stove on the market.

• We developed the best charcoal stove in Haiti. 2200 of these stoves have been used in Port Au Prince - saving a total of 2,400 tons of wood per year, and a total of $90,000 per year to stove owners. This Haiti success also led us to win the title 'best charcoal stove' in six focus groups recently completed in Kenya.

Prakti is a finalist for a fellowship to attend the 2012 “Unreasonable Institute” – an amazing opportunity to build relationships with potential investors, foundations and other social entrepreneurs. To receive a fellowship, we need to be one of the first 25 finalists to raise $10,000 by March 6th. With your donation and support, Prakti can continue to produce the world’s leading fuel-efficient biomass cookstoves, tangibly improving the health, livelihood and environment of the poorest one half of the world’s population.

Please help us by making a contribution at the Unreasonable Marketplace: https://marketplace.unreasonableinstitute.org/project/prakti-design-lab/

----

Learn more about Prakti:
Website - http://www.praktidesign.com/
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/PraktiDesign
YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lv-nuwbyUBU

Zapatillas de running Nike - Mujer

Recho TiBwa (Roket) in Haiti

16 February 2012 - 4:52pm

Anderson

Flip and John Anderson, January, 2012

Biochar stoves: An innovation studies perspective

16 February 2012 - 4:39pm

Carter

Sarah Carter, October, 2011
Nexus Center for Development

Nexus Center for Development is an organization that is working with partners in the carbon credit market and focused on finding projects that alleviate poverty and simultaneously reduce climate change.

Sarah was gracious enough to share her presentation on cooking stoves with us
Biochar stoves: An innovation
studies perspective

Biochar

Biomass

Survey of Existing Research on Jatropha Toxicity

16 February 2012 - 2:10pm

Barbee, Mike

Mike Barbee, January 2012

Jatropha curcas is grown as a living livestock corral and as a bio-fuel crop in several areas of the developing world. The seed from the Jatropha plant, as well as the oils are toxic to animals and to people. Ingestion, or skin contact with the oils of the plants, leafs and seeds is known to be toxic, and Mike does a nice job of documenting the current research about the plant in his paper: Summary of Literature on Jatropha Toxicity

It appears that there is NO RESEARCH on the toxicity of Inhaled jatropha either seed, stem, or cake (or pressed cake) form. This is an area of particular concern for me as we evaluate the effectiveness of using Jatropha as a fuel for cooking stoves.

to quote Mike:

There are no studies about jatropha the fraction of phorbol esters that may be present during pressing, composting, or burning. There is not enough information about the volatility to estimate the partitioning of oil that may contain esters in the air during the processing and application

The Key recommendation:
"It is recommended at this point, that those who are working directly with oil and seed cake during the pressing process wear protective eye and skin covering and, if possible, surgical masks to reduce inhalation."

Guatemala

Jatropha

Jatropha Seed

Indoor Air Quality in Rural Chinese Kitchens & Village-Scale Clean Energy Interventions

15 February 2012 - 12:00am

Susan Fischer

Field research in Jilin province, China
Use of nephelometer in rural field setting
Characterization of indoor air quality and driving factors
Case study: three village-scale clean energy interventions

Conclusion:

nephelometers promising, but must be used with caution
High-humidity samples or dense, poorly mixed plumes create nonsystematic optical distortion
Conventional measures of central tendency sensitive to distortion when high-humidity samples are not censored

Indoor air quality and driving factors in a rural Chinese village

Time-resolved CO and PM data enable characterization of peak pollution periods.
Diversity of fuels within single village facilitate investigation of fuel- and stove-related factors as well as tobacco smoking as determinants of indoor air pollution.

Though 24-h CO well within standards, a substantial fraction (27%) of peak 1-h episodes exceed WHO’s 1-h guideline & outliers surpass OSHA’s evacuation threshold. Short-term resolution is critical for characterizing acute risks posed by CO exposures in rural kitchens.

Adoption of “improved” cooking fuels does not suffice to reduce indoor air pollution where heating dominates fuel use. Health-oriented interventions limited to provision of improved cooking fuel are insufficient in cold climates.

Asics Onitsuka Tiger

File attachments: