Cooking with the sun

Cooking with the sun

Nowadays $7 doesn’t buy much. Yet this small amount can drastically change the lives of entire families by providing a solar cooker for people who are currently dependant on wood for cooking.

In regions with plenty of sun and where firewood is becoming increasingly scarce, this simple and inexpensive cooker makes it possible not only to harness the sun’s energy to cook but also to purify water.

In the last 12 years Solar Cookers International (SCI) has provided cookers for more than 30,000 families in Africa. Using them — it is estimated that three billion people rely solely on wood for their cooking needs — women and children are no longer burdened with gathering firewood and carrying it for miles.

Simple cookers that use ordinary items like cardboard boxes covered with aluminum foil can be used not only to cook and boil water but also to help remove indoor smoke pollution and decrease deforestation.

The “Kyoto Box,” named after the Kyoto Protocol, consists of two cardboard boxes, one inside the other, with an acrylic cover that traps the sun’s heat inside and doubles as a hob. A layer of straw or newspaper between the boxes provides insulation, while black paint on the interior and the foil on the exterior concentrate the heat still further.

The cooker can boil about 2.5 gallons of water in two hours and cook rice, chicken and vegetables. Food can be cooked at 85º F. and when the sun goes down, the lids can be closed and the food will remain warm. One box can provide for half a family’s cooking needs and reduce almost two tons of carbon emissions per year.

This simple box, which can dramatically improve the lives of women and children, earned its inventor, Jon Bøhemer, a $75,000 prize awarded by the Financial Times in their Climate Change Challenge.

The Kyoto Box can be produced in existing cardboard factories. It has just gone into production in a Nairobi factory that can produce 2.5 million boxes a month. A more durable model is being made from recycled plastic.

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