Clean Cookstoves

Our goal is to create efficient and clean burning cook stoves that will mitigate the negative effects on women’s health and the environment. 

Project Leader(s): Tom Wall & Heidi Vreeland

Exposure to smoke from traditional cookstoves and open fires—the primary means of cooking and heating for nearly three billion people in the developing world—causes 2 million premature deaths annually, with women and young children the most affected. Reliance on biomass for cooking and heating forces women and children to spend many hours each week collecting wood.  Women face severe personal security risks as they forage for fuel, especially from refugee camps and in conflict zones.  Cookstoves also increase pressures on local environmental resources (e.g., forests, habitat) and contribute to climate change at the regional and global levels. -cleancookstoves.org

EWB Cook Stoves began by building a rocket stove design currently being implemented in Haiti. This particular stove interested us because of its success in Haiti and because the construction materials were widely available in countries where EWB GT was already working on projects. We explored finding a design that would be easy to understand and recreate. This design was taken to Cameroon in May and we have since received positive feedback.

Currently, EWB Cook Stoves is building a relationship with Hands for Americas, an organization that is interested in implementing cookstoves in Panama. We will soon build a model stove on campus and then test the reduction in emissions in a laboratory setting. EWB Cook Stoves is looking forward to working with Hands for Americas this semester and further investigating stove design.

EWB-GT works to research and fabricate improved cookstove designs for the communities we work in.  Currently, we are piloting a cookstove project in Cameroon.  The design is based off of research done by Jon and Flip Anderson in Haiti.  Our many thanks to Jon and Flip for all their work on the design.  More info can be found at their site: http://www.rechoroket.com

 

Get Involved:

  • Researching appropriate methods to test air quality from stove emissions
  • Air quality testing
  • Researching the current design and finding improvements 
  • Building a model of the improved stove and testing the efficiency and emissions rates

Contact Heidi Vreeland at heidi.vreeland@gatech.edu

Or Tom Wall at tom.a.wall@gmail.com 

Meeting Times: Mondays at 7:00 PM