In-Home Emissions of Greenhouse Pollutants from Rocket and Traditional Biomass Cooking Stoves in Uganda, April 2o11.
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USAID.
In July 2010, Berkeley Air Monitoring Group, in collaboration with Columbia University’s Earth Institute and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, collected cookstove emissions data in Ruhiira, Uganda, one of the Millennium Village project sites. This project was a highly collaborative effort made possible by funding from the United States Agency for International Development, with the goal of better understanding the relationship between climate change and improved stoves.
The resulting data provide the first field assessment in Africa of a stove intervention’s impact on greenhouse gas and health damaging pollutant emissions, which are defined as the quantity or rate of pollutants emitted directly from the stove as a result of combusting fuels. It is important to distinguish this type of field-based emissions study from health-focused assessments of household air pollution concentrations, which previously have been conducted in Africa, albeit not extensively.
A total of 35 cooking events were sampled in 10 homes. Each home was sampled when the cook was using a traditional openfire (hereafter referred to as a traditional stove) and again when she was using a StoveTec rocket stove to allow direct comparison of samples. Cooking events were uncontrolled, with the participants asked to cook their regular meals and use their normal fuelwood and fire tending practices. The StoveTec rocket stove is a well characterized, mass-manufactured stove that was disseminated in this Millennium Village 5-12 months prior to the emissions study.
