Sister City receives important grant to support EcoStove program

BREAKING (GOOD) NEWS, 21 September 2022: The Newton/San Juan del Sur (Nicaragua) Sister City Project has just been awarded a generous grant from the Thoracic Foundation to support our EcoStove Project for two years. The Boston-based Thoracic Foundation supports efforts to combat respiratory illness. Newton’s EcoStove is made with unbaked earthenware bricks and has a chimney to vent smoke out of the house (and out of people’s lungs). Stoves are fabricated by participating families under supervision of Newton’s Stove Coordinator. Domestic air pollution (from cooking smoke) will cause more premature deaths on the planet this year than AIDS and Malaria combined (World Health Organization).

We will have a table at the Green Expo in Newton Centre on October 16, 2022 to explain how we moved away from an older model of our EcoStove, one based on heavy use of cement and iron rebar, to a new approach using Compressed Earth Blocks made of clay-rich soil, rejecting the use of cement entirely, and using only a minimum of rebar to make an embedded support for the heavy pots of rice and beans. One reason for this change is that we know now what we didn’t in previous years: “If Cement were a country, it would the the world’s Third Largest Emitter of Greenhouse Gases, after China and the US.” As much as 8% of all Greenhouse Gases come from the huge amounts of fossil fuels used to bake limestone to make Portland Cement.

Here is a recent video that shows how these earthenware stoves are built:

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