Killer kitchens: $25 million investment aims to reduce deaths worldwide from indoor air pollution

Bryan Willson, a CSU professor of mechanical engineering and founder of the Engines and Energy Conversion Lab, works on a prototype of the clean-burning stove.

A ground-breaking partnership with Shell Foundation and Envirofit International Ltd. will use clean-stove technology developed at Colorado State University to significantly reduce deaths caused by indoor air pollution.

Almost half of the world's population uses unsafe stoves for their daily meals, burning biomass fuels like wood, dung, and crop waste, which generates lethal fumes. The resulting indoor air pollution causes 1.5 million deaths per year, according to the World Health Organization.

Envirofit, a Fort Collins, Colo.-based spinoff company from Colorado State University's Engines and Energy Conversion Laboratory, will design and distribute 10 million clean-burning cookstoves in developing countries under a five-year, $25 million grant from the Shell Foundation.

Global entity

The Shell Foundation will provide Envirofit with investment and organizational support to form an independent global entity. In turn, Envirofit will work with CSU’s Engines Lab to design, develop, market, and distribute the cookstoves engineered to emit fewer toxins and burn less fuel.

Envirofit’s commercial model represents a more sustainable approach to tackling indoor air pollution, relying on market mechanisms to guide product development and drive consumer demand, instead of donating or subsidizing the sales of stoves, the Shell Foundation stated in a press release.

The Shell Foundation sees this partnership as one of the most important developments in its seven-year history. "What makes us stand out from other development charities is our technique of applying market principles and business thinking to figure out how to tackle global developmental challenges,” said Kurt Hoffman, Shell Foundation director.

"With half the world's population still cooking on wood, dung, and other biomass-burning stoves, the only way we are going to make a significant long-term impact and achieve the scale needed is to get private sector thinking involved," Hoffman said.

Need-based technologies

Envirofit combines world-class engineering, a mature product development cycle, creative global marketing, and robust, on-the-ground operations. The team works to address barriers to product adoption in the developing world.

"Solutions to [indoor air pollution] reside in creating need-based technologies and financing, which are in turn based on market principles. The partnership between Shell Foundation and Envirofit is a breath of fresh air, one that will provide the impetus for market and end-user centric solutions," said Harish Hande, managing director of Selco India, a leading Indian social venture enterprise.

The Shell Foundation was established in 2000 as an independent, U.K.-registered charity with a global focus on enterprise-based solutions to poverty and environmental challenges linked to energy and globalization. Envirofit International is a nonprofit corporation formed in 2003 with a primary emphasis on improving living conditions in the developing world.