Video: BioLite, makers of CampStove, launches revolutionary HomeStove program

HomeStove

BioLite has announced the launch of commercial pilots for its revolutionary HomeStove. The programs, launched this year in India, Ghana and Uganda, will demonstrate the health, climate, and economic benefits of the low-cost biomass cookstove, which reduces smoke emissions by 90 percent while generating electricity to charge mobile phones and LED lights.

The HomeStove’s thermoelectric technology has huge implications for the developing world, where 3 billion people cook over smoky, indoor fires and 4 million people, primarily women and children, die prematurely as a result. The HomeStove also has considerable implications for the environment: it dramatically reduces the climate-warming emissions from open fire cooking, which currently creates more black carbon than all the cars and trucks in the world combined.

BioLite has been working with local, rural energy distributors to bring HomeStoves to 10,000 families. BioLite plans to refine its scaling plan that will allow it to reach more than 1 million homes within the next five years.

"We believe that the combination of consumer desired electricity access with the health benefits of reduced emissions has the potential to revolutionize the purchase and adoption of clean cookstoves. And by building markets instead of using a charity-based model, we can scale and sustain the success of the HomeStove for real long-term impact, ” says BioLite CEO Jonathan Cedar. "While cooking is a necessity, dying from smoke inhalation doesn't have to be.”

CampStove

Continued Cedar, “These pilot programs enable us to further optimize three key components of the HomeStove project: product adoption by rural communities, carbon reduction and possible offset credits, and pre-natal and infant respiratory disease prevention.”

BioLite refined its thermoelectric technology on the CampStove, a compact, portable wood-burning cookstove, which also utilizes biomass to create both a cooking fire while generating electricity. Sales of the CampStove help BioLite fund the initial costs to build and support the HomeStove market abroad.

About BioLite

BioLite develops and manufactures advanced energy products that make cooking with wood as clean, safe, and easy as modern fuels while also generating electricity to charge small devices like  cell phones and LED lights off-grid. Headquartered in Brooklyn, NY, the company was founded in 2009 by Jonathan Cedar and Alec Drummond. Discover more about BioLite at biolitestove.com.