The Costco Connection - December 2016

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112 ;e Costco Connection DECEMBER 2016

B A SC H P H OTO G R AP H Y; HIM AL AYA N S TO VE P RO JE C T;

Left: Cooking over an open ;re indoors. Right: same home with a new stove.

prise company based in Fort Collins, Colorado.

The stoves cost about $150 each; the easy installation process takes about 10 minutes, and includes venting outside the home through a simple chimney system. The stoves reduce household pollution by 90 percent and use 75 percent less fuel. For kids, time saved from gathering fuel can be spent on education or playing, and moms can use the time for community activities and socialization.

MORE THAN 4 million people annually die prematurely from illnesses attributable to household air pollution caused by cooking with solid fuels, according to the World Health Organization. Roughly 7,500 to 8,700 of these deaths a year occur in Nepal alone. Costco member George Basch of Taos, New Mexico, is doing something about it with his Himalayan Stove Project (HSP).

A trip to Nepal in 2009 provided the catalyst. “Anybody who goes to Nepal and goes to the villages and homes gets exposed to the terrible indoor air pollution conditions that these people are living under,” says Basch, who at 80 continues to trek. “They burn whatever fuel is available, whether it’s wood or crop waste or yak dung. It’s a miserable environment.” That practice, combined with the lack of ventilation, creates an environment unsuitable for human inhalation.

HSP ( himalayanstoveproject.org), with help
from Nepal-focused organizations, identifies
people most in need and gives them fuel-
efficient stoves from Envirofit, a social enter-
Basch describes the effect on one particu-
lar family that he personally witnessed.
“When the smoke cleared, we all sat down
and had dinner together in their kitchen,
which was the first time they had [been able
to do] that in their lives. They socialized as a
family, and we were honored to be part of it.”
Donations to HSP go toward the pur-
chase of the stoves, as well as distribution.
“Our limitation is funding,” explains Basch.
“The mountainous region has around 5 mil-
lion people. So the needs up there are for a
million stoves. We’ve delivered 4,000—which
I think is a great accomplishment—but that
means we have 996,000 to go.”—Steve Fisher