BIOLITE PRINCIPALS AT MOUNTAINFILM IN TELLURIDE

19 May BIOLITE PRINCIPALS AT MOUNTAINFILM IN TELLURIDE

HomeStove photo courtesy of BioLite

So, you’re an outdoors enthusiast, do multi-day climbs, spend a week on the river, or maybe you’re a through-hiker. You love your old MSR camp stove, but don’t like burning a petroleum product, or just don’t like the possibility of leaking fuel in your pack. Alec Drummond and Jonathan Cedar felt that frustration– and then they did something about it. The result is the BioLite CampStove, a cleverly engineered cylinder which uses dry twigs, pine cones and such as fuel, and an electric fan to oxygenate the fire (the heat is the power source to charge the battery, and excess power can be used to recharge your iPhone or an LED light). All this in a package about the size of your Nalgene bottle.

Jonathan and Alec will be guests at Mountainfilm in Telluride Memorial Weekend, 2013. Jonathan will be part of the Symposium on Friday, May 24.

The theme of this year’s Moving Mountains Symposium is “Climate Solutions.” So how is a new company with a cool camp stove involved in a discussion about climate solutions? Obviously BioLite didn’t stop with designing the CampStove. It turns out that in many parts of the world, cooking is done over an open wood fire, which contributes hugely not only to carbon loading, but to health issues, particularly among poor women and their children. As BioLite’s director of emerging markets, Ethan Kay, put it in his TEDxMontreal talk last Fall, BioLite’s mission is to be able to sell their HomeStove model to millions of low income households around the world at an affordable price. The HomeStove is designed to cut wood use in half, reduce smoke by 95%, and nearly eliminate black carbon, a significant contributor to climate change. And to address one of the paradoxes in the third world, homes with no electricity but which own a cell phone, the HomeStove also has the capability of charging that cell phone or an LED light to study by.

Sounds like a win-win, and a good reason to hear from BioLite during Mountainfilm in Telluride 2013.

For more information, click the “play” button and listen to my conversation with Jonathan Cedar.