What happens when you want to save the trees, help reduce carbon emissions, and save a lot of lives? You’d probably end up inventing the Kyoto Box, a cheap but very useful solar-powered cardboard cooker. Solar cookers are not new inventions, we have seen them before, but the Kyoto Box is probably the cheapest and most useful of all solar cookers.
Jonathan Boehmer, a Norwegian based in Kenya, invented the Kyoto Box; it was his winning entry to the FT Climate Change Challenge 2009. What made the Kyoto Box a winner? There are two things that make it a winner: it is very cheap and it poses to deliver immense environmental and social benefits.
More than two billion people in some areas in Africa and Asia use wood as fuel when they boil water, as they need to boil water to purify it. Wood comes from trees, so it means that in order to save lives, trees are sacrificed. But with the Kyoto box, which costs only around $5 to build, thousands of trees and billions of lives can be saved.
The Kyoto Box makes use of the green house effect to do its magic. It is made of two cardboard boxes, one inside the other. A covering that is made of acrylic allows the sunlight to come in the box and stay there to build heat strong enough to boil water or cook food. Straw or old newspaper can be used for insulation. The box is painted black to help keep the sun’s heat in. The Kyoto Box is easy to mass produce, any box factory can manufacture it. And because it is very cheap, it easily can be distributed to the millions of families in the developing world who still use wood as fuel. The Kyoto Box will not only help reduce carbon dioxide emissions but also provide a source of clean boiled water to billions of people while saving trees.
“This is the simplest idea I could find,” the inventor of Kyoto Box said. “That is the philosophy behind it.”
