Plant-It 2020

PLANT-IT 2020 STOVE DISTRIBUTION PROGRAM:

The typical stove used for cooking in most countries worldwide is not much better than a stone or iron age campfire; it is poorly insulated, inefficiently burns a lot of wood and it spews disease-causing particulates into the air. In addition, the weekly cost for wood helps keep numerous families in poverty.

The solution is to provide needy families with better cooking stoves. These stoves reduce or eliminate the need for wood thus reducing the demand for logging forests, reduce poverty via several ways and in the case of the biochar stove (see pic), reduces starvation through increased crop production.

Plant-It 2020 is pleased to announce that it now offers contributors the ability to fund two types of cooking stoves for needy families; 1) the fuel-efficient cook stove and 2) the biochar stove.

Fuel-Efficient Cook Stove

Plant-It 2020 partners with GROW member Trees, Water and People to distribute fuel-efficient cooking stoves to needy families in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Haiti.

Why is this fuel-efficient cook stove program important?

• As these stoves use 70% less wood, loggers have less demand so less trees will be logged.
• Families pay to purchase wood as cooking fuel. With a 70% less need for wood, family income rises.
• Typical stoves release clouds of toxic smoke into the home as there is no 'chimney' or exhaust tube. The 'Huesta' stove drastically reduces particulates, which means that the families receiving them will have better health than otherwise.
• One version of these stoves allows families to cook and sell tortillas so they have a method of reducing or escaping poverty.

Biochar Cook Stove

Plant-It 2020 became the first reforestation nonprofit to actively support biochar stoves (see pic). A biochar stove takes any organic input to be used as fuel so the stove owner need not purchase wood as fuel. The oxygen-free cooking method creates a special type of charcoal, which may either be burned again as fuel or put into cropland to increase crop production by up to five times (depending upon the organic material used as fuel). Biochar is perhaps the most promising approach towards reducing worldwide starvation, logging and the greenhouse effect as it can be a carbon-negative process (cooking-to-crop enhancement).

We have partnered with Seachar to provide biochar stoves to migrant coffee pickers in Costa Rica and hope to expand our biochar stove program to other countries in the near future.

Why is this biochar stove program important?

• Biochar stoves do not simply reduce but eliminate the need for wood. This means less demand for logging and one weekly cost eliminated for the impoverished.
• Biochar stoves can increase crop production; which will reduce starvation and perhaps create an additional source of income for impoverished families.
• Biochar stoves can be a carbon negative process when the right fuel is used and when it is put into the ground for agricultural purposes. This means that it can combat global warming.

Plant-It 2020 continues to set benchmarks in the nonprofit, reforestation industry. We strongly believe in the distribution of biochar cook stoves and will continue to not only promote reforestation projects that beneficially impact people but also be the first to promote biochar stoves; which take wood out of the cooking equation entirely.