Hasta La Ideas

The BioLite Stove was founded by Jonathan Ceder and Alexander Drummond. Most recently, BioLite won the 2011 St. Andrews Prize for the Environment in May. We had a chance to speak with Clay Burns, who is the product development lead for the company.

Core77: First off, could you please describe a bit about your background and how you got involved with the BioLite Stove.

Clay Burns: I’ve always liked making things and trying to solve creative problems. I studied engineering and art at Dartmouth College and what was then called “human factors” in graduate school. For about ten years I was a partner at Smart Design. The co-founders of the BioLite technology, Jonathan Cedar and Alec Drummond, also worked there. In addition to typical big client projects, one of my adopted roles was to foster internal, pro-bono, and sustainable design projects. Jonathan and Alec’s biomass stove idea was one of those internal projects and over time the two inventors left Smart to take a shot at being entrepreneurs. We all kept in touch and I went to work on my own a few years ago. In early 2011, when two product markets were clearly defined and funding was secured to really make a go of it, I joined BioLite as a product development lead.

What is the BioLite stove?

The main benefit of BioLite is to reduce emissions from people cooking on wood stoves (which is 1/3rd of the world). All the incomplete combustion contributes CO, CO2, and black carbon. This is inhaled by a family’s lungs. Smoke inhalation is the second biggest killer in the world after malnutrition.

The technology uses the heat of a biomass (e.g. wood) fire to generate its own electricity and run a small fan that adds air in a specific manner to improve combustion, saving fuel and dramatically reducing emissions in the process. And because the energy generated by the fire is more than is needed to power the fan, we are exploring other features, such as charging a cell phone or powering a small LED lamp.

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