Cardboard Kyoto Box Sizzles with Solar
Most of us put cardboard boxes into the recycling bin. Unless we need them for storage, we really have no further use for them. But children see cardboard boxes differently. They become tents, houses, caves in their games of hide and seek.
Realizing this, Jon Bohmer decided to use cardboard boxes as the basis for creating a simple project to work on with his children. Little did he know, it would eventually evolve into the award winning entry in the FT Climate Change Challenge.
A little creativity, inspired by his kids, resulted in the Kyoto box, a solar cooker made from two cardboard boxes and a sheet of acrylic. Very simply, one box is covered with silver foil. Another box is painted black and placed inside the silver foil covered box. The saucepan of water or casserole can be positioned inside the boxes and an acrylic sheet is placed on top as a cover. Solar power from the sun’s rays do the rest of the work.
No fuel, no firewood – all that’s needed is a little bit of sunshine (something that’s never in short supply in the African continent).
Bohmer, a Norwegian-born entrepreneur based in Kenya, plans on mass producing these solar cookers at an already-established cardboard factory in Nairobi and distributing them throughout rural Africa.
Image: Jon Bohmer
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2 Comments
April 13th, 2009 at 7:16 pm
Those of us who have worked for years to promote awareness of solar cooking are thrilled at the prize won by Jon Bohmer for his solar cooker. The publicity it has generated will help raise the profile of this simple, powerful and renewable technology.
It is however, not a “˜new invention’.
Here is a page from the Solar Cooking archive with detailed instructions for the basic design that Mr. Bohmer used.
The cardboard solar box cooker, for which Mr. Bohmer won $75,000 from the FT Climate Change Challenge is a variation on one of the many designs that have been freely available to the public for years on Solar Cookers International’s archive.
The archive website contains extensive data on the design, construction, dissemination and international use of solar cookers to reduce carbon emissions and deforestation.
After logging on to the SCI web archive, users can click on build a solar cooker. There they will find detailed plans for a variety of cardboard, wood, metal and plastic solar box cookers, solar panel cookers and solar parabolic cookers.
Solar cooker advocates like Mr. Bohmer who have been inspired by the many designs currently available often come up with new variations and post them to our website where they can be shared with the rest of the world.
The solar box cooker is the oldest type of solar cooker. It was first widely promoted by two American women who were among the founders of SCI in 1988. As you can see from this newsletter, our organization was initially know as Solar Box Cookers International. Another of SCI’s founders, Robert Metcalf has been traveling the world for decades teaching people how to build and use solar cookers not only for cooking but also for solar water pasteurization.
When refugee populations in Africa began expanding in the early 1990s and access to cooking fuel and clean water became a serious problem for these people, a more portable version of the cardboard box solar cooker was developed by Roger Bernard.
Almost all solar cooker projects are currently funded by small non-profits. There is little to no government funding available. And yet many governments continue to subsidize the purchase of bottled cooking gas by up to 50% and the charcoal trade is destroying the forests of Africa and south Asia. This must change.
The largest solar cooker project currently underway is in three Darfur refugee camps in Chad. The women in those camps have manufactured and distributed more than 30,000 cardboard and aluminum foil Cookits. Trips outside the camp to gather firewood have been reduced by 86%.
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