Solar-powered cooker wins $75,000 climate prize

subscribe

A $6 cardboard box that uses solar power to cook food, sterilize water and could help 3 billion poor people cut greenhouse gases, has won a $75,000 prize for ideas to fight global warming.

The "Kyoto Box," named after the United Nations' Kyoto Protocol that seeks to cut emissions of greenhouse gases, is aimed at billions of people who use firewood to cook.

Costing 5 euros ($6.60) to make, it can also make it easier to boil polluted water.

"We're saving lives and saving trees," the Kyoto Box's developer Jon Boehmer, a Norwegian based in Kenya, said in a statement.

The FT Climate Change Challenge was backed by the Financial Times, technology group Hewlett-Packard, which sponsored the award, and development group Forum for the Future.

The other four finalists were a garlic-based feed additive to cut methane emissions from livestock, an indoor cooling system using hollow tiles, a cover for truck wheels to reduce fuel use and a "giant industrial microwave" for creating charcoal.

A statement said that Boehmer would carry out trials in 10 countries, including South Africa, India and Indonesia. He would then collect data to back an application for carbon credits.

The United Nations is discussing giving credits to developing countries that preserve tropical forests, which soak up carbon as they grow. Those credits could then be traded.

Many countries are looking for cheap green ways to stimulate economies mired in recession. More than 190 nations have agreed to work out a new U.N. climate pact to succeed Kyoto at a meeting in Copenhagen in December 2009.

Related News

israel power plant

Will Israeli power supply competition bring cheaper electricity?

TEL AVIV - "See the pseudo-reform in the electricity sector: no lower prices, no opening the market to competition, and no choice of electricity suppliers, with a high rate for consumers despite natural gas." This is an advertisement by the Private Power Producers Forum that is appearing everywhere: Facebook, the Internet, billboards, and the press.

Is it possible that the biggest reform in the economy with a cost estimated by Israel Electric Corporation (IEC) (TASE: ELEC.B22) at NIS 7 billion is really a pseudo-reform? In contrast to the assertions by the private electricity producers, who are supposedly worried about our wallets…

READ MORE
new daimler electric vehicles

Daimler Details Gigantic Scope of Its Electrification Plan

READ MORE

andrea horwath

An NDP government would make hydro public again, end off-peak pricing, Horwath says in Sudbury

READ MORE

alberta electricity meter

Alberta ratepayers on the hook for unpaid gas and electricity bills from utility deferral program

READ MORE

chuck schumer

Top Senate Democrat calls for permanent renewable energy, storage, EV tax credits

READ MORE