IAP Linked To Increase In Ischemic Stroke Frequency

Air pollution does more than cause asthma; it damages the brain, say Researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Campus in an article in the MCS America Newsletter, February 2011.

"While it is well known that air pollution affects human health through cardiovascular and respiratory morbidity and mortality, it has only recently been shown that these deleterious effects extend to the brain," says researcher Michelle Block, "Air pollution has been implicated as a chronic source of neuroinflammation and reactive oxygen species that produce neuropathology and central nervous system disease."

Stroke, Alzheimer´s, and Parkinson´s disease have all been linked to air pollution. Changes in the blood-brain barrier are a key component in the way air pollution affects the brain and central nervous system. When the blood-brain barrier becomes more permeable, pollution has greater access to the brain.

Block dates back the first instance of the impact of air pollution upon the brain being noted with an increase in ischemic stroke frequency found in individuals exposed to indoor coal fumes.

It is believed that air pollution leads to cerebral vascular damage, neuroinflammation, and neurodegeneration through four routes. First, air pollution leads to systemic inflammation, second, ultrafine particles have easier access to systemic circulation and, thus, the brain. Third, nanoparticles provide toxicants an ideal entry to the brain and finally, ozone, when inhaled reacts with proteins and lipids to generate modifications, free radicals, and toxic compounds.

Block says that air pollution contains both particulate matter and gases and is not limited to industrial emissions. Indoor air is considered more contaminated as compared to the outdoor air with  Pesticides, air "fresheners", cleaning products, plastics, and formaldehyde from furniture and clothing comprising major indoor air pollutants.

Read the full article on: Air Pollution Shown to Lead to Brain Damage

Ethiopia's Tryst With Improved Cook Stoves

Even as administrator of US EPA, Lisa P Jackson, is on a visit to Ethiopia to discuss with the Government issues relating to environmental health, improvement of indoor air quality through clean cook stoves and management of electronic waste, Dr Ashok Gadgil of Berkeley Lab is testing out a modified version of the Berkeley-Darfur stove to accommodate the specific characteristics of Ethiopian cooking.

As per a report on TsehaiNY.com, Jackson will speak with students from Addis Ababa University to encourage women to come forward and take charge in addressing environmental issues facing Ethiopia. She will also participate in a demonstration of clean cook stove technology with civil society groups to learn about the work of local non-governmental organizations.

In the meantime, Berkeley Lab is poised to open a new chapter in cook stoves in Ethiopia. Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in partnership with several non-governmental organizations (NGOs) including Oxfam America and the Clinton Global Initiative are testing out an adaptation of the Berkeley-Darfur stoves which reduces firewood consumption by up to 50 per cent.

With help from the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s Technology Commercialization Fund (TCF), Lead Scientist Dr. Ashok Gadgil is bringing his latest innovation to Ethiopian households which face the problem of acute firewood scarcity due to shortage of firewood.

Keeping the same basic design of the Berkeley-Darfur cookstove, the researchers modified it keeping the Ethiopian style of cooking in mind.

Dr. Gadgil is a strong proponent of field testing and says that while the principles of the efficient cookstove were known for many decades, the Berkeley team is doing things more effectively just by listening to the end user. These field tests usually consist of one group of women cooking a traditional meal using a three-stone fire and another group that simultaneously cooks an identical meal using the energy efficient cookstove.  Currently there are twenty fuel-efficient cookstoves being tested on the ground in Ethiopia.  Dr. Gadgil hopes to have 500 more of the stoves in Ethiopia for additional testing in the coming months, according to a report in in Energy.gov.

Photo: From Berkeley Lab

Read the story Berkeley Lab’s Ashok Gadgil Takes Fuel Efficient Cookstoves to Ethiopia

Read the full story on: US environmental protection official visits Ethiopia

SNV Call For Ethiopia ICS Program

SNV Ethiopia which is currently involved in a national domestic biogas programme, now wants to start a national large scale ICS programme. This programme will assist the rural population of Ethopia to have access to clean, efficient and affordable cooking devices.

SNV has invited consultants with strong knowledge of the biomass energy sector in Ethiopia to bid for a study on household improved cooking stove (ICS). The job of the consultant would be to collect and study data related to development status in the agricultural and livestock sectors, energy demand and supply in household sector, energy policy and plans, health and sanitation related needs and local environmental concerns related to deforestation, among others.

SNV aims to get a clear picture of the current status of ICS sector in Ethopia through this study. It also expects the study will make recommendations on capacity development interventions by SNV to increase the effectiveness of ICS.

Photo  Courtesy: SNV

For full details: Call for Consultancy Service

GIZ Turns To Cookstoves For Carbon Credit Creation In Africa

Islan Asset Management Sarl (Islan) and Ecoinvest Carbon S.A. have been picked by the German Agency for International Co-operation (GIZ) to establish a program to curb greenhouse gas by distributing energy-efficient cooking stoves in Africa. The SADC Regional Carbon Facility (SRCF) program will initially focus on Mozambique, Malawi, Tanzania and Zambia.

The program to replace less energy-efficient stoves may curb carbon dioxide output by about 2 million metric tons over seven years, creating carbon credits.

The improved cookstoves supported by the SRCF bring health and financial benefits to local communities in the host countries and contribute to sustainable economic development through local manufacturing and distribution businesses.

SRFC will focus in collecting data and qualifying them for carbon emission credits. Islan will manage the financing of the costs of emission credits while Ecoinvest Carbon S.A.  will give technical advisory.

“We are excited to partner with Islan Asset Management Sarl (Islan) and Ecoinvest Carbon S.A. They bring market leading expertise in emissions and a long history of operating in emerging economies. We are certain they will continue the fine work by ProBEC in developing cookstove opportunity in Southern Africa,” said Peter Conze, GIZ Country Director for South Africa, Botswana and Lesotho.

To read full story: Islan Asset Management will manage the Southern African Development Community Regional Carbon Facility

Photo: The KUUTE stove. 

The Tanzania Cook Stove Dissemination Project is developing and testing cost-effective methods to disseminate an improved cook stove throughout urban, charcoal-using markets of Tanzania. After evaluating various cook stove designs, project leaders chose a biomass energy saving stove known as the “KUUTE” stove. KUUTE has been shown to increase fuel savings and heat transfer when compared to other leading designs. It is developed in Tanzania and is made by local artisans. While the initial reception has been positive, KUUTE is a relatively new innovation. Researchers, in partnership with a local NGO, COSTECH, hope to increase the efficiency of their dissemination efforts by focusing on vendor trainings. The dissemination method of the stoves would rely on existing producers and supply chains and thus add only minimal new infrastructure costs. Additionally, the project is working on the development and verification of a Gold Standard principles-based methodology to tap carbon credits from the voluntary market for cook stove projects.

Africa's Carbon Credits Route To Clean Cookstoves

Suraj Wahab, co-founder of Toyola Energy Cookstoves in Ghana, Africa, "didn't see coal pots [stoves], but a market of four million [Ghanaians] no one was selling to." In Ghana, Toyola has been able to make inroads with its 40-percent-more-efficient models, sold for prices as low as $7. Toyola sold roughly 140,000 cookstoves to households and "chop bars," or local restaurants, since 2006, including 51,000 stoves last year, says a report in National Geographic, "Protecting Health And The Planet With Clean Cookstoves".

One of the reasons why Toyola has been successful is that it has benefited from connecting the reduced emissions from cook stoves to the larger global issue of climate change and earn carbon credits, becoming only the second cook stove project in the world to do so.

The Toyola business model combines local practices with global linkages. Toyola operates with 200 employees in a decentralized operation across five locations in Ghana and one in Togo. The issue of reaching the last mile is addressed by "stores" which are trucks that deliver cookstoves and has sales activists who sell both the concept and the product. The big A of affordability gets handled often through credit and by encouraging savings.

At the global level, Toyola is an outcome of a USAID cookstove training program in which the founders Wahab and Ernest Kyei had participated. The initial investment -- and the potential for carbon credits to keep down the cost of stoves and to finance growth -- came from US-based E+Co. A carbon credit of up to $20 per stove more than offsets the higher production costs of building stoves with ceramic liners, and provides funds for expansion.

According to the National Geographic report, Toyola thus far has received revenues from the sale of 51,230 tons of carbon credits for cookstove use between August 31, 2007 and September 8, 2009.

Photo Courtesy: E+Co
Read the full story on: Protecting Health and the Planet With Clean Cookstoves

The Quest For Clean Cookstoves

'My choice is between going out there and collecting firewood and being raped, or for my husband to go out and get killed, and I would rather go and get raped,'. These stark words from women in North Uganda possibly explain the great human tragedy that is linked to the innocuous firewood cookstove and drives hundreds and thousands of engineers, social development experts and field workers to continue their unrelenting quest for the clean cook stove.

These words motivate people and organizations such as Veronique Barbelet of the World Food Programme to find solutions that can help solve the problem of firewood and the killer smoke from firewood and results in a collaboration like the one between Aprovecho and World Food Programme in Africa.

The World Food Programme now plans to use in Africa an Approvecho stove to cook meals for school children and refugee camps. The stove is built in a steel 55-gallon drum and has the capacity of cooking rice for 20 people with only a handful of wood sticks, 90 per cent less than what traditional stoves use.

An NPR report etches the journey of Aprovecho, improved cookstoves and the various efforts at fixing one of the biggest threats to women and children's health. The "rocket stove" Larry Winiarski invented in the 1980s is the prototype for Aprovecho's current crop of clean, efficient stoves, and his 10 principles have become the catechism for good stove design around the world.

Photo Courtesy: Aprovecho (Participants from the World Food Programme and a Kenyan NGO observe the flame of a top-burning Institutional Stove.)

To Read Full Story: Engineers Hone Clean Energy Stoves For the World 

The Guatemala Stove Project

The February 2011 session for building stoves by the Guatemala Stove Project (GSP) is currently underway. The GSP is an indigenous non-profit organization formed by a small group of North American volunteers. GSP has been making stove since 1999 and has since then built about 3500 stoves. The stove building projects are funded by donations from various people.

Every year the organization collects a group of volunteers who build stoves for the Mayan people with the help of local masons. The families served by the GSP are part of Guatemala's impoverished Maya majority. Sixty per cent of Guatemalans who are members of indigenous Mayan groups own only six per cent of the land and most of them survive on less than $2 a day.  For centuries, the Maya have cooked on three-stone fires built on the floors of kitchens.

The need to build cookstoves came up as the open fire inside the houses had terrible impact on the health of women and children. While some women suffered from severe hearing and eyesight impairment others suffered from lung infections or both. A simple masonry stove made with a stovepipe that carried the smoke outside solved the problem of the people.

This year Karen Secord of Canada along with many others has volunteered to build stoves in the Western Highlands of Guatemala. For that purpose she went through Stove-building workshop in Perth. Karen is hopeful that the experience will be both beneficial and rewarding. "I feel it is my opportunity to give back to help others. If it weren't for the kindness of others, I might not be in a position to help,” she said.

To read the full story: Changing lives in Guatemala 

More Breathing Space In Sustainable Homes

It goes beyond the cooking stove: The quantum of Indoor Air Pollution may be critically dependent upon the nature, structure and quality of construction, says a new research that compared 'sustainable homes' with a normally constructed home in Tamil Nadu over an extended period of time. A sustainable home is built with pyramidal shape of roof in the rural area.

A paper, Studies on Indoor Air Quality in a Rural Sustainable Home authored by S. Palanivelraja and K. I. Manirathinem of Annamalai University in the journal World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology records indoor air quality in a sustainable rural house built in Vilathur village located at Cuddalore district of Tamil Nadu, India, 15 km off Chidambaram and compares it with the other houses in the village. The sustainable house was made with fly ash bricks and had better air quality and natural light. The design was pyramidal which provided better inflow of sunlight. Most of the 116 existing houses in Vilathur were of thatched roof with unburnt brick walls, 11 of them were made with reinforced cement concrete while only few houses were tiled.

Measurements of indoor and outdoor carbon monoxide (CO), Carbon Dioxide (ppm CO2), Temperature (°F/°C), Dew Point Temperature, Absolute Humidity, Wet Bulb Temperature and Relative Humidity (%RH) concentrations were conducted at the sustainable home using DirectSense™.

The comparative study of the sustainable home and a regular home showed that the IAP concentration levels were higher in the latter. After a statistical analysis was done, the research arrived at a correlation between indoor concentration levels with outdoor concentrations of CO and CO2. Indoor and outdoor CO and CO2 concentrations showed a significant positive correlation except in the kitchen for CO2. The results suggests that during winter, outdoor CO sources are not responsible for increase in indoor concentrations but indoor sources like burning of wood, smoking, etc. will affect the concentrations. In this study area where CO and CO2 concentration were maximum in indoor due to cooking in the kitchen which in turn affected the living room concentration. The study was also conducted in different seasons to find out the pollution levels. It showed that in winter months the concentration of CO is higher and leads to health hazard.

While concluding that indoor and outdoor pollutants in the sustainable houses in Cuddalore were much lesser than in the existing rural home, the paper suggests that a long-term database of the pollutants levels in indoor air in India will help decision makers formulate and implement policies.  The authors say that the sustainable home concept can be extended to all rural people and a better living condition can be created for rural India as they are the back bone of Indian agriculture.

Read the paper: Studies on Indoor Air Quality in a Rural Sustainable Home.

EPA Award For Stove Team International

Stove Team International, an improved cookstove organisation has been awarded the “Special Achievement Award in Developing Local Markets" for fuel-efficient stove projects by the EPA’s Partnership for Clean Indoor Air (PCIA). Founder Nancy Hughes was also awarded Whitman College Alumnus of Merit as per a report on Hedon.

Established in 2008, StoveTeam International has built stove factories in four countries, which have sold more than 12,000 stoves.

Nancy Hughes felt the need to come up with a solution on indoor air pollution and its associated problems when she traveled to Guatemala with a medical team in 2004. In Guatemala, she met an 18 year old girl whose hands were burnt shut at the age of two from cookstove fire. And the girl was waiting all those years to get surgery done on her hands. There were babies with choked throats with creosote, countless causes of hernias from collecting wood, and the effects of deforestation which had reached incurable stages.

On leaving Guatemala, Hughes realized the unavailability of medical services to the innumerable inhabitants. She wanted to go to the root of the problem and find a solution for it –which was smoke from the cookstoves.

She got help from Rotary International in form of a grant which was used to manufacture Ecocina, a portable, affordable and safe cookstove. She found local entrepreneurs who were willing to start sustainable factories to produce the stoves which also created employment. Her work was recognized among one of 100 people in the world who were contributing to the society and was awarded the ‘Service Above Self Award’ in 2009. 

In January this year, Hughes was awarded the Whitman College Alumnus of Merit Award for recognizing the health issues associated with open-fire cooking and developing Ecocina stove and starting Stove Team international to counter the problems.

In 2011, StoveTeam will be helping to establish clean cookstove factories in Mexico, Ghana and Kenya. 

Photo Courtesy: Stove Team International
Read the full story on: StoveTeam International Wins Top Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Award

Women Make Effective Renewable Energy Entrepreneurs: AIWC

Women's role in technology has been largely overlooked, says Lalitha Balakrishnan of All India Women’s Conference (AIWC), pointing out the significance of women to promoting renewable energy and reducing carbon footprint. She believes that there is enough evidence to show that supporting women’s own innovation abilities could be a rich source of improving renewable energy technologies, while at the same time increasing women’s own capabilities and confidence.

In a radio series for the Indian Vigyan Prasar, she says that there is a stereo type that women are not technologists and that they are not capable (even when provided with appropriate support) of building, operating and maintaining sophisticated technologies. Women, she says, experience a number of constraints in their involvement of technology, including women’s indigenous technology innovations, often highly sophisticated, not being considered as real “science”.

She advocates involving women in the technical know-how of using bio‐gas, solar devices and improved chulhas, and also be economically independent.

Mrs. Balakrishnan said that the mindset of not including women in decision making related to energy has to be changed. Women are the worst affected by energy scarcity and related environmental degradation as per the findings of World Renewable Energy Congress (held in Florence Italy). This makes it imperative to involve women in decision making related to energy as renewable energy must be applied in a culturally sensitive way, keeping the needs of women in mind.

Balakrishnan points out that as energy consumers and beneficiaries, women have contributed to design of household’s energy technologies and projects. Improved stoves programmes have been more effective and produced more benefit when they have obtained women input to produce the same and have targeted marketing and credit to women and men as appropriate.

As micro entrepreneurs, women have used renewable energy to increase profits and efficiency in their informal sector enterprises and have proven themselves capable of operating and also constructing renewable energy technologies on their own, when provided with appropriate training and support. Women may be effective renewable energy entrepreneurs due to their experience as users of energy in households and their own enterprises; in some countries including India, women are already marketing solar home systems successfully, she says.

As extension workers and caretakers, women have been effective in operation and maintenance roles of biogas, hydro electric and solar installations.

Balakrishnan argues that as leaders, networkers and lobbyist women have successfully influenced energy policy decisions at the local, national and international levels. "Women do not necessarily help to build, operate or maintain renewable energy installations alone, more important is that women have a role in determining the use and benefits of the projects and in managing these arrangements and they receive and control benefits."

Says Balakrishnan, "Though Indian women have participated in energy intensive micro enterprises, they have done so in their free time and only with the motive of adding on to the family income. But even the projects of RETS that are aimed at women have not had the desired effect due to lack of resources such as cultural and economic setbacks."

She says that the challenge lies in involving more women and transforming them into energy entrepreneurs since they are the one who will benefit the most from improved cookstoves, biogas and vermi composting, amongst other renewable energy technologies.

She recounts that the improved cook stoves program started in eighties was designated as a ‘program for women by women’. Says Balakrishnan, "The All India Women’s Conference implemented the National Program of Improved Chulhas (NPIC) after being identified as a nodal agency. More than one lakh improved chulhas were constructed through 1000 self employed women. AIWC’s Andhra Pradesh Branch Guntur Mahila Samajam is implementing this program till today in tribal areas."

Read the full story on: Women & Renewable Energy