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Cookstove Technology Standards

Scott Cooper, Vice President of Government Relations, American National Standards Institute

More than two billion people worldwide burn traditional biomass (e.g., wood, dung, crop residues and charcoal), indoors on a stove or three-stone fire for their home cooking and heating. The health effects from the resulting indoor air pollution ranks as the fourth worst health risk in poor countries. According to the World Health Organization, breathing elevated levels of indoor smoke results in the premature deaths of an estimated 1.9 million people each year – over 4,000 each day – with women and children most significantly affected. Exposures to particulate matter in developing countries are often hundreds of times the levels acceptable in the U.S. for ambient air.

The use of current inefficient cookstoves, which require on average 50% more fuel than efficient cook stoves, is also a major contributor to deforestation and desertification in countries where they are used. Recent studies show that poorly-combusted biomass (commonly called soot, or black carbon) is likely responsible for up to 18% of the planet’s warming, making it the #2 contributor to rising global temperatures, after carbon dioxide. As the New York Times stated in an article earlier this year (4/16/09), “Replacing primitive cook stoves with modern versions that emit far less soot could provide a much-needed stopgap, while nations struggle with the more difficult task of enacting programs and developing technologies to curb carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels.”

A sustainable and market-efficient means of reducing cookstove emissions is to foster the design, manufacture, distribution and use of clean, efficient cookstoves. However, according to the WHO, there are currently no commonly accepted standards for cookstove emissions criteria, or methods to assess them. One of the primary challenges in arriving at a consensus on standards is that there is no differentiation between “clean” and “unclean” cookstoves in the marketplace. Cheap, inefficient cookstoves can look very similar to efficient, more durable ones. In a classic application of Gresham’s law, bad cookstoves can easily drive good cookstoves from the marketplace.

A potential solution to this challenge is to develop a set of internationally recognized testing and inspection protocols that establish a common mechanism for ensuring that relevant benchmark levels for cookstove emissions are met. By promoting agreed-upon testing protocols, individual countries or organizations could set their own benchmark level, but the same standards would be used to determine compliance with the requirements. Test protocols for cookstoves have been developed, but are currently in only sporadic use by individual companies and organizations.

There is however, wide-spread agreement that getting efficient cookstoves into the marketplace –and thus into homes in developing countries– is an important health and environment issue. If the implementation issues were easy, given the consensus about the seriousness of the problem, they would have been overcome by now. But there are still many problems that must be addressed.

For one, cooking styles and food preparation vary widely by region. Some cultures stir pots vigorously, which means that tipping controls are important. In other places, an attached griddle must cook food under an intense, hot heat. In other places a slow, prolonged heat is required. Furthermore, stoves must be both durable under daily use and yet cheap enough to induce mass production. Simple lab tests, such as how much fuel and/or how long it takes to bring water to boil, are not all that helpful. A lot more field testing is needed.
These variables have impeded current efforts to scale the use of efficient cookstoves. There are many admirable projects to build stoves in a number of regions of the world, but the production rates are –at best– in the tens of thousands annually. The problem to be addressed measures in the millions.

There are signs of hope, however. The House-passed Energy bill (H.R. 2454) directs the EPA Administrator to work with the State Department (and others) to develop programs to scale cookstoves to 20 million homes in five years with goals to increase stove efficiencies by 50%, reduce black carbon by 60% and reduce the incidence of pneumonia in children under five by 30%. All those goals are achievable, and should be a down payment for a continuing series of improvements as we learn more about how to build, test, scale and situate efficient cookstoves in the nearly one billion homes that will greatly benefit from their use.

There needs to be collaboration between all those who recognize both the seriousness of the issue, and the compelling opportunity to effectuate solutions that will make significant improvements in the lives of billions of people and in the health of our planet. The World Health Organization, the United Nations, and the World Bank can all play a role in meeting this challenge. Governments, foundations, standards developers, NGOs and the private sector all need to participate in developing practicable solutions. And I expect when solutions are found, we will then wonder why it took so long to solve such an obvious and compelling problem. But to get to that point, we need to call the initial meeting to order.

Autumn 2009 Climate Alert

How Does Black Carbon Change the Climate Debate? [ PDF ]

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