Arizona Solar Center Blog

• Over 60 years of life, it is estimated that the average conifer tree will absorb 1 TON of Carbon Dioxide.
• Reducing the carbon footprint of an artificial tree to that below a living tree takes 20 years of re-use.
  
  • Suggestion: buy a potted tree that can be replanted after the holidays; if you do get a cut tree, find your local after Christmas tree recycling facility.
• The amount of holiday cards sent out every year could fill a ten-story football stadium.
  
  • Suggestion: send seasonal greetings through e-mail to reduce waste.
• Most mass-produced holiday wrapping paper CANNOT by recycled.
  
  • Suggestion: use newspaper or old wallpaper as wrapping, or better yet, give a gift of your time or a donation to a charity, bypassing the gift wrap altogether!
• One string of LED decorative lights uses on average 90% less energy than traditional lights.

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Go to Sidebar 1, Maintain Temperature Stratification in Your Tank
Go to Sidebar 2, Rust Never Sleeps: Open Loop vs. Closed Loop

Overcoming fuel shortages in developing nations

The energy problem is far more extreme in less-developed parts of the world than in the United States. In places like eastern Africa, natives have trouble finding sufficient firewood to cook dinner or heat water to kill bacteria. Women sometimes walk 20 to 30 miles to obtain only a two-day supply of cooking fuel.

The simple solar box cooker is helping people to stay healthy in places such as Zimbabwe, Bolivia, Guatemala, Kenya, Haiti, and Pakistan. In Botswana in 1988, for example, solar box cookers were introduced because of a 50 percent malnutrition rate. This devastating health problem was not caused by food shortages but by a lack of fuel.

Two Arizona women created these cookers, Barbara Kerr, a nurse from Taylor, Arizona, and Sherry Cole, a former freelance writer from Tempe. Their solar box cookers reach temperatures as high as 325 degrees Fahrenheit and easily kill cholera bacteria at 150 degrees. The cookers are constructed with two corrugated boxes, one smaller than the other, 100 feet of aluminum foil, a pint of glue, a lot of newspaper, and a sheet of glass.

Kerr, and Cole’s first box cooker was created in the 1970s, and the first sale went to microbiologist Bob Metcalf of California University in Sacramento. Metcalf formed the organization Solar Box Cookers International in 1987 to promote the cookers for health and environmental benefits worldwide. The group’s expeditions have received support from the Pillsbury Co. Meals for Millions Applied Nutrition Project, Foster Parents Plan and Food Industry Crusade Against Hunger.