Advantages of solar cooking, compiled from different sources (sources are cited at the bottom.) Since we’re only interested in the environmental (and perhaps some economical) aspect, I left out the social/health/other reasons.
- Independancy from wood – if wood from trees is no longer needed, desertification can be stopped in many regions.
- Independancy from fossile fuels – after the solar cooking device is payd no further costs will burden the users over several years.
- The devices are cheap, robust and can be maintained by the users itself.
- The annual per capita wood consumption for cooking in most parts of the world is about .5 ton (1.32 kg per day), or about 3 tons per family of six people. A solar cooker can save one ton of wood per year.
- The energy for solar cooking is infinitely renewable and entirely non-polluting.
- The World Health Organization reports that cooking with fuel wood is the equivalent of smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. Inhalation of smoke from cooking fires causes respiratory diseases and death. One of the solutions advocated to address this problem is solar cooking which makes no smoke at all. It just uses free and abundant solar energy.
Also, might want to have a look at this which claims to be:
more convenient, much lower-priced, and now competitive with alternatives such as wood, charcoal, and wood stoves. One such model, an open reflector, has been widely tested and has proven useful in the USA, Kenya and Zimbabwe. It pays for itself in fuel savings in two months or less and becomes a recurrent economic benefit to individual households.
It’s called a Cookit.
By the way, here’s instructions on how to build your own solar cooker:
http://www.charityguide.org/volunteer/fewhours/solar-ovens.htm
Sources:
http://solarcooking.wikia.com/wiki/Advantages_of_solar_cooking
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cooker#Environmental_advantages
http://www.energieinfo.de/eglossar/solar_cooking.html
