Stoves that Save: Poet Partners to Fight Pollution and Deforestation in Haiti with Ethanol Cookstoves
by Janna Farley (Ethanol Producer Magazine) Deforestation and pollution have distressed the country’s environment and beauty. The chronic effects of disease, economic instability and social unrest, coupled with the infrastructure devastation from the 2010 earthquake, have positioned Haiti among the poorest countries in the world. The extreme poverty makes life on the island hard, particularly when it comes to meeting one of life’s basic needs: food. Not only do Haitians have to worry about where their next meal is coming from. They also have to worry about how to cook it.
“Cooking is something that most of us here in the United States do all the time without even thinking twice about it,” says Brady Luceno, assistant director for Project Gaia, a Gettysburg, Pennsylvania-based nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting and implementing projects based around clean cookstoves powered by alcohol fuels.
Haitians, however, like many people in developing countries, cook over open fires, using solid fuels such as charcoal, wood and other biomass substrates. But wood and charcoal are expensive and often hard to get. “People are suffering because they can’t afford to cook their daily meals,” Luceno says. Not to mention that burning these solid fuels is bad for the environment—and the residual smoke and carcinogens are bad for people’s health. “It’s gotten to the point where we’ve reached a crisis,” Luceno says. “Something has to change.”
The solution could be found in a very familiar substance—ethanol. And if all goes as planned, it not only will help fight pollution and deforestation in Haiti, but also stimulate and revive the Haitian economy. That’s where Poet LLC, one of the nation’s largest producers of ethanol, comes in. Through a new partnership with Project Gaia, Poet hopes to help replace wood-burning stoves in Haiti with clean, ethanol-fueled cook stoves.
…
“Ethanol is safe to handle from both a toxicity and flammability standpoint, and the emissions from burning ethanol are virtually nonexistent, with the primary combustion byproducts being simply carbon dioxide and water vapor.”
To jump-start the project, Poet donated 12,000 gallons of ethanol, shipping two loads from its production site in Jewell, Iowa, to Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The first rollout of stoves and fuel began earlier this year. A couple hundred stoves have been distributed so far.
…
“We found that in Haiti, people were spending 56 cents to cook one meal because of the fuel cost,” Luceno says. “It’s our hope that with ethanol, they’ll be able to cook more meals with the same amount of money.”
Abounding Benefits
The benefits don’t stop there. Improved cooking conditions will also help improve Haitians’ health. Household air pollution—essentially kitchen smoke resulting from burning wood and charcoal indoors—“is the silent killer in the kitchen,” Luceno says. The United Nations estimates that the average lifespan in Haiti is shortened by 6.6 years due to illnesses caused by household air pollution.
…
The country of Haiti is testimony to the fact that you cannot give people out of poverty. Despite the best intentions of hundreds of nonprofit organizations and millions of donated dollars, the country of Haiti has made very little progress toward sustaining its own people. “Economic opportunity is what they need, not another handout,” Van Hulzen says.
As more Haitians start using the cookstoves, there will be a bigger market for ethanol in the country. Ethanol imported from the United States will help meet that demand for the home-cooking fuel. But eventually, Haitians could produce their own. “Ethanol offers perhaps the greatest opportunity to revitalize the agriculture sector and offer families a clean and affordable alternative to charcoal,” Luceno says. “Haiti was once a leading alcohol-producing nation but currently produces only a fraction of its potential. Those sugar cane mills and alcohol distilleries represent a ready infrastructure for a clean energy future. If ethanol were produced there, it could be cost-competitive with charcoal, kerosene and liquid petroleum gas.” This kind of socioeconomic development is the most effective way to teach a man to fish, or, more aptly, to “give a man a market,” Van Hulzen (Shon Van Hulzen, director of quality control for Poet plant management in Sioux Falls, South Dakota) says.
…
Project Gaia estimates that if every home in Africa, developing Asia, Latin America and the Middle East that is currently using traditional solid fuels would switch to ethanol fuel for cooking, the resulting demand would be more than 27 billion gallons of ethanol annually. READ MORE
