Indoor cooking stoves kill 2 million yearly: study
Primitive cooking stoves are used throughout half the world and kill more people per year — about two million — than malaria, said a study published in the United States on Thursday.
Three billion people worldwide cooki indoors by burning solid fuels such as wood, charcoal or dung, yet little public awareness surrounds what the World Health Organization describes as the globe’s top environmental killer.
The smoke that pours from these unvented cooking fires fills indoor spaces and causes pneumonia and chronic lung disease that particularly affects women and children who tend to spend more time in the home while men are outside working.
More research and programs to sell more efficient cookstoves to residents in remote or impoverished areas could help improve health and allow girls to get educated rather than spend time gathering fuel, said the research in the journal Science.
“Many people in developed countries don’t realize that smoke from indoor cooking fires is a terrible scourge upon the health of a large number of people,” said co-author Francis Collins, director of the US National Institutes of Health.
“International efforts to combat this scourge are now beginning. The NIH‘s role is to support the research that will determine the most efficient, cost-effective means to do so while safe guarding human health.”
One program in the Andean highlands of Peru has had some success. In that area, where about 30 percent of the Peruvian population lives (10 million people), 40 percent of women have heart and chronic obstructive lung diseases.
In addition, up to 60 percent of children are malnourished and suffer “relentless respiratory diseases,” said an accompanying editorial by Peru’s former first lady Pilar Nores Bodereau.
She founded a program called Sembrando, a private initiative that helps local members of the community build better cooking stoves, latrines and grow family orchards, all at a cost of about 200 US dollars per family.
In the past five years, the project has served 92,000 families, or about 500,000 people in the Andes, and early studies show a “substantial decrease in bronchopulmonary diseases and a clear increase in the height/weight ratio of children under five years old,” she wrote.
The project has “inspired the Peruvian government to start a campaign to build 500,000 clean cookstoves nationwide,” she added.
The United Nations Foundation has launched its own public-private partnership to establish a market for clean and efficient cookng stoves and fuels in the developing world, called the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves.
Its goal is to have 100 million homes using cleaner cookstoves and fuels by 2020. More than 175 countries, foundations, corporations, and other nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are involved.
The study in Science said the US government “has committed more than $50 million, including about $25 million of the NIH’s ongoing research funds” toward studying the impact of indoor air pollution from cooking fires.
Between $150 and $200 million is needed for a comprehensive research program on how much pollution reduction is needed to see a health improvement, as well as the benefits of current efforts to use better cooking stoves, said the study.
In addition, the UN program does not aim to give stoves away for free, even though the people who need them are already quite poor.
“A cooking stove purchased by the consumer is inherently more valued than one that is received without charge, especially if the free stove was designed without consumer input,” said the study.
Cooking oil thefts
Cooking-oil theft is on the rise as the evolving biodiesel market has led to an increase in its value, according to Detective Crystal Nosal, an Arlington police spokeswoman.
“Police departments in the region are becoming more involved to remedy this problem,” Nosal said.
Industry insiders say the Ballston arrests mark a major breakthrough in combating an emerging form of commodity theft.
“It’s a brand-new crime,” said Steve Blankenship, regional manager of Charlottesville-based Greenlight Biofuels, which buys used oil from restaurants. “And it’s happening on an unbelievable scale.” He said the cooking oil can sell on the street for as much as $4 per gallon.
Fa De Zheng, 36, of Oxon Hill and Ming Gang Lu, 38, of New York were charged with grand larceny and related charges on Oct. 7. Police say they were breaking into an oil container used by a client of Greenlight Biofuels.
At least four restaurants serviced by Greenlight Biofuels have been hit, police said.
In recent years, companies have been buying used oil and converting it into biodiesel fuel, a petroleum diesel alternative that can be used in diesel engines.
According to Blankenship, the cooking oil can also be converted into animal feed. Firms in that business pay more for the oil than biodiesel firms, he said.
Blankenship said his company has been losing about 20,000 gallons a month, or 5 to 10 percent of its business. He said the thefts have been happening for years but have increased significantly in recent months. The company learns the oil is stolen when it goes to collect it.
Greenlight Biofuels hired private investigators and engaged several area police departments — some of which did not take him seriously at first, Blankenship said.
“We’ve been actively trying to solve this for some time now, and we recently got traction,” he said.
Blankenship said about 10 companies in the area buy used cooking oil.
Arlington police said Greenlight Biofuels contacted investigators in September but reported that thefts have been a major problem since March. Arlington detectives began watching the cooking oil deposits and caught the thieves in the act last week, they said.
“This is a huge relief for us,” Blankenship said.
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