Envirofit Partners with Berkeley Air Monitoring Group to Conduct Large Scale Impact Study On Clean Cookstoves

• Envirofit to conduct large-scale study with Berkeley Air Monitoring Group on the adoption of clean cookstoves and their impact on indoor air quality.
• Envirofit develops innovative remote SMS-based heat sensor to efficiently monitor cookstove adoption.

Envirofit is partnering with Berkeley Air Monitoring Group to conduct a comprehensive, large-scale study on the impact of cookstoves in Honduran households. This study is a unique opportunity for the clean energy sector because it will provide information on clean cookstove adoption for thousands of households and directly monitor changes in indoor air pollution with clean cookstove use.

While millions of clean cookstove have been distributed across the globe, only a small number of large scale impact studies at the household level have been conducted throughout the sector because of the time and resources required in data collection. However, the scope of President Juan Orlando’s Vida Mejor program in Honduras represents a special opportunity to examine the impacts of household air pollution.

Based on World Health Organization guidelines, the study will focus on indoor air quality levels, and people’s exposure to Household Air Pollution (HAP). A global health epidemic, HAP exposure affects over 4 million Hondurans every day who cook over smoky, inefficient stoves. Over the past two years Envirofit has worked with the Honduran government and FUNDEIH – a Honduran non-governmental organization – to replace traditional stoves with the Ecofogon El Ahorrador. The Ecofogon El Ahorrador is a modern household plancha cookstove that lowers exposure to HAP through cleaner combustion, and vents smoke through a chimney outside the home.

In collaboration with FUNDEIH and the Vida Mejor government program, there are now more than 170,000 Envirofit Ecofogon El Ahorrador stoves in Honduran households. This large number of households provides the large sample size needed to better understand the impacts of clean cookstoves.

“This combination of in-field air quality measurements using established WHO guidelines, and data on household stove usage from such a large sample size is unprecedented,” said Nathan Lorenz, Envirofit founder and VP of Engineering. “Envirofit is proud to collaborate with public and private institutions around the world, and this wouldn’t’ have been possible without our partnerships with FUNDEIH and Honduran president Juan Orlando.”

Previously, collecting stove usage information was very resource intensive, requiring in-person visits to individual households. To reduce the costs and resources required in monitoring cookstove use, Envirofit has developed an innovative remote sensor that makes data collection more efficient.  The sensor is powered by the heat from the stove and will transmit data via SMS, allowing for large amounts of data to be collected remotely. Funding for this study and the development of the sensor is made possible by contributions from Vitol Foundation, FMO, and Shell Foundation.