Cook stove

A biomass cook stove is heated by burning wood, charcoal, animal dung or crop residue. Cook stoves are commonly used for cooking and heating food in rural households. Nearly half of the world's population, approximately 3 billion people, use solid fuels such as coal, wood, animal dung, and crop residues for their domestic energy needs. Among those who use indoor cooking stoves, the poorest families living in rural areas most frequently use solid fuels, where it continues to be relied on by up to 90% of households. Households in developing countries consume significantly less energy than those in developed countries; however, over 50% of the energy is for cooking food. The average rural family spends 20% or more of its income purchasing wood or charcoal for cooking. The urban poor also frequently spend a significant portion of their income on the purchase of wood or charcoal. Deforestation and erosion often result from harvesting wood for cooking fuel. The main goal of most improved cooking stoves is to reduce the pressure placed on local forests by reducing the amount of wood the stoves consume, and to reduce the negative health impacts associated with exposure to toxic smoke from traditional stoves. A biomass cook stove is heated by burning wood, charcoal, animal dung or crop residue. Cook stoves are commonly used for cooking and heating food in rural households. Nearly half of the world's population, approximately 3 billion people, use solid fuels such as coal, wood, animal dung, and crop residues for their domestic energy needs. Among those who use indoor cooking stoves, the poorest families living in rural areas most frequently use solid fuels, where it continues to be relied on by up to 90% of households. Households in developing countries consume significantly less energy than those in developed countries; however, over 50% of the energy is for cooking food. The average rural family spends 20% or more of its income purchasing wood or charcoal for cooking. The urban poor also frequently spend a significant portion of their income on the purchase of wood or charcoal. Deforestation and erosion often result from harvesting wood for cooking fuel. The main goal of most improved cooking stoves is to reduce the pressure placed on local forests by reducing the amount of wood the stoves consume, and to reduce the negative health impacts associated with exposure to toxic smoke from traditional stoves. Often used in open fires or poorly ventilated stoves, solid fuel burning is a significant source of indoor air pollution. Solid fuel smoke contains thousands of substances, many of which are hazardous to human health. The most well understood of these substances are carbon monoxide (CO); small particulate matter; nitrous oxide; sulfur oxides; a range of volatile organic compounds, including formaldehyde, benzene and 1,3-butadiene; and polycyclic aromatic compounds, such as benzo-a-pyrene, which are thought to have both short and long term health consequences. Cooking over a traditional open fire or mud stove can cause increased health problems brought on from the smoke, particularly lung and eye ailments, but also birth defects. The health problems associated with cooking using biomass in traditional stoves affect women and children most strongly, as they spend the most time near the domestic hearth. Replacing the traditional 3-rock cook stove or mud stove with an improved one and venting the smoke out of the house through a chimney can significantly improve a family's health. There are many well-documented adverse health effects of exposure to pollutants from indoor cookstoves, including acute respiratory infections (ARIs), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), pulmonary tuberculosis (TB), cataracts, low birth weight (LBW), increased perinatal and infant mortality, nasopharyngeal and laryngeal cancer, and lung cancer. It is estimated that 4% to 5% of the global mortality and disability adjusted life-years (DALYs) are from ARIs, COPD, TB, asthma, lung cancer, ischemic heart disease, and blindness attributed to solid fuel combustion when cooking in developing countries. Behavioral change interventions, in reducing childhood household exposures, have the potential to reduce household air pollution exposure by 20 to 98%. Indoor Air Pollution (IAP)exposure can be greatly reduced by cooking outdoors, reducing time spent in the cooking area, keeping the kitchen door open while cooking, avoid leaning over the fire while attending to the  meal preparation, staying away while  carrying children when  cooking and keeping the children away from the cooking area. Opportunities to educate communities on reducing household indoor air pollution exposure include festival collaborations, religious meetings, and medical outreach clinics. Community health workers represent a significant resource for educating communities to help raise awareness regarding reducing the effects of indoor air pollution. Exposure to indoor air pollution (IAP) from the burning of fossil fuels for cooking, heating and lighting accounts for a significant portion of the global burden of death and disease and disproportionately affects women and children in developing regions. In developing regions, women are more often responsible for childcare and household duties such as cooking. This places women and children at the greatest exposure of IAP from burning solid fuel during cooking and heating of the home. Examples of specific health impact from the use of indoor cooking units includes new cases of asthma in children.   The use of indoor cooking units has been shown to increase the risk of developing asthma by 2 to 3.5 times when controlling for all other factors.  These and other studies show that in addition to the irritants being inhaled, exposure to the indoor cooking units actually changes children's pulmonary response to the irritants with a more reactive and inflammatory response that may last well into adulthood. Given that indoor cooking units are in use in the most rural and remote communities, the development of asthma by a child can create a significant burden in a family and pose a significant risk for death if children are subject to an asthma attack and are without access to rescue inhaler or emergency medical care The traditional method of cooking is on a three-stone cooking fire or on a mud stove. The three-stone fire is the cheapest stove to produce, requiring only three suitable stones of the same height on which a cooking pot can be balanced over a fire. However, this cooking method also has problems: The World Health Organization has documented the significant number of deaths caused by smoke from home fires. The negative impacts can be reduced by using improved cook stoves, improved fuels (e.g. biogas, or kerosene instead of dung), changes to the environment (e.g. use of a chimney), and changes to user behavior (e.g. drying fuel wood before use, using a lid during cooking).' Improved stoves are more efficient, meaning that the stove's users spend less time gathering wood or other fuels, suffer less emphysema and other lung diseases prevalent in smoke-filled homes, while reducing deforestation and air pollution. However, a closed stove may result in production of more soot and ultra-fine particles than an open fire would. For instance, an improvement of the energy efficiency from 25% for the traditional Lao stove (wood and charcoal fired) to 29% efficiency for an improved Lao stove, results in 21% less wood fuel being needed, and saves 182,000 ton CO2eq emissions, as reported in a GHG-compensation project. The traditional Lao stove needs an average of 385 kilograms of charcoal and 450 kilograms of wood per year as fuel. For making a kilogram of charcoal about seven kilograms of wood is needed. The report also indicates that in Cambodia 369,000 tons of non-renewable biomass wood fuel is consumed yearly for charcoal production for these stoves, destroying 45 km² of deciduous forests. 4% of the forest regrows.