A joint Zambian and Swedish venture is looking to curb deforestation by introducing a new type of cook stove into Zambian households, which runs solely on clean fuel.

Zambia cuts down hundreds of thousands of wooded acres every year, as one of the most aggressive sites of deforestation in the world. According to a recent report, Zambia loses between 600,000 and 750,000 acres of its 125 million acres of forest each year. One of the major drivers of this deforestation is household cooking on charcoal-burning stoves, used in 80% of households. While electric stoves are making headway among the country's wealthy, unreliable electricity requires nearly every house to have a charcoal-burning backup, which is both unsafe and detrimental to the environment. Emerging cooking solutions' bio-waste pellet-burning stove could eliminate the use of charcoal from kitchens — if it catches on. 

Using disposed sawdust from pine and eucalyptus trees, emerging cooking solutions manufactures pellets made from the bustling sawmill industry in Kitwe, located in the country's lucrative Copperbelt region. "Sawdust lies untapped and unused, while charcoal has exerted tremendous pressure on the forests,"  said Sonta Kuati, founder of Emerging Cooking Solutions. The bio-waste pellets replace the need for liquefied petroleum gas and kerosene burned in the charcoal-burning stoves (as well as the need for charcoal). Users also save money on fuel; trees are spared from further deforestation. "Bio-energy pellet making has been largely nonexistent in Africa," Kuati says. "We want Zambia to be on the map, and we want to show other countries like Zambia that we can use clean energy."  _____________________________________________________________________________________

Story by: Zoe Fox traveled to Zambia on a fellowship from the International Reporting Project. Source: www.mashable.com Image(s): Zoe Fox, Mashable, www.eko-ben.pltree.swf