The $10 cooking stove that could save millions of lives

Traditional wood cooking fumes kill more people globally than Malaria and TB

30 Aug 2016

This $10 stove wants to promote wood-free cooking in South America and India, to reverse the devastating impacts it can have on the population

Ricardo Espinosa

In September 2013, Mexican entrepreneur Carlos Glatt met a 14-year-old girl who was breastfeeding a baby. She was clearly very ill, so he took her to the local hospital, in Guerrero, Mexico, where she lived.

"She had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease because she had been cooking with wood," says Glatt, 51. "I was very upset and decided I had to do something."
Cooking with wood in a confined space kills more people globally than malaria or tuberculosis. The World Health Organization estimates that more than four million people die prematurely every year from using solid fuels and open fires inside their homes.

To give people in poor regions a more affordable alternative, Glatt designed a cheap, efficient 15cm x 15cm stove powered by an alcohol-based fuel. "I had something that people could use to cook inside their homes with no smoke," says Glatt. He sold his tourism brand Piraña Joe and set up a workshop in his kitchen. "My wife thought I was crazy."

The $10 (£7) Glatt Stove, or La Estufita ("little stove"), looks like a simple camping stove, but the fuel is liquid, not gas. A one-litre bottle of Glatt Stove fuel costs $1, can cook for up to five hours and is as easy to transport as a bottle of Coca-Cola. "It's the cheapest stove in the world," claims Glatt, "and it's as efficient as the one you have at home."
Glatt's Tultitlán-based company produced 120,000 stoves for its February 2016 launch. He is in talks with distributors in Spain and Tanzania, but for now is focusing on South America and India. "We want to find the best way to sell, then we go global," he says.