Environ Health Perspect Mar 2010, 118:a124-a129. doi:10.1289/ehp.118-a124
Better Burning, Better Breathing: Improving Health with Cleaner Cook Stoves.
Adler T.
Excerpt from the article: Is Better Good Enough?
Data from studies such as RESPIRE will help answer an important question facing clean-stove advocates and public health experts: how much must concentrations of smoke in homes be reduced in order to improve families’ health? When tested in the field, few of the improved cook stoves used in India achieve more than a 50–60% reduction in indoor air pollution levels and a 50% reduction in fuel use, says Simon Bishop, policy and communications manager at the Shell Foundation, which promotes improved cook stoves as a primary solution to indoor air pollution.
Whereas manufacturer testing in the laboratory may indicate a stove is capable of producing far less CO and suspended PM10 compared with traditional cook stoves, field conditions—particularly the significant natural variations in operator behavior and the type, size, and moisture content of the fuel used—can lead to substantially lower performance than might be predicted from lab tests, according to Kirk Smith. There are advanced stoves but “we don’t think any of them are truly as advanced as they should be,” Smith says.
“The existing improved stoves have to go some way before they can meet a health-based standard, but they are much, much better than the traditional stoves we have now,” says Kalpana Balakrishnan, head of the Department of Environmental Health Engineering at Sri Ramachandra University in Chennai. Studies by Balakrishnan and colleagues suggest even existing cleaner cook stoves will contribute to an immediate improvement in children’s health. And for many populations, especially the poorest, it may be that current technologies are a reasonable intermediate step—just “not a policy end point,” says Bruce. He adds, “We have to be pragmatic.”
None of the existing stove technology was commercially available 3 years ago, and even better devices will be introduced in the next 3 years, points out Jacob Moss, a senior advisor at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and director of the Partnership for Clean Indoor Air, an international collaboration comprising more than 340 partners. “If supply and distribution networks can be developed now, the newer technologies will be able to be substituted into them as they reach the market,” Moss says.
Next on the Agenda
Although smoke from cook stoves is clearly a significant public health issue, another one is larger: malnutrition. “We’ve just started to look at programs that are seeking to integrate household environmental interventions for household energy, water, and sanitation with nutrition,” says Bruce.
It’s unclear yet whether these integrated programs are more successful if run together or separately, Bruce says. There’s plenty of opportunity to find out: Experts estimate 600–800 million homes worldwide need improved cook stoves, and according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, more than 1 billion people were undernourished in 2009.
