Six Critical Ways That Solar Ovens Impact Worldwide Disease, Hunger, Water Contamination, and the Environment


1. Drinking Water

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reports that each year up to one billion children suffer from diarrhea caused by drinking contaminated water.  Of those children, 5 million die.  Solar ovens can pasteurize water, giving children a chance at life.

2. Reduces Eye Disease, Lung Disease, and Burns

Solar ovens reduce the amount of smoke inhaled by family members.  This will mean less eye disease or blindness, and less lung disease.  In addition, there will be fewer burns from children not falling into open fires.  Fewer women will experience burns from their clothing catching on fire or small propane stoves exploding.

3. Environmentally Friendly

The forests of the world are disappearing, causing erosion, less oxygen, more droughts and further reducing food supplies.  Sunshine is nonpolluting and inexhaustible.  Cooking with a solar oven means less deforestation, soil depletion, and pollution.  This encourages more trees, better crops, and cleaner air.  Dried animal dung gathered for fuel could be better used being put back into the soil for fertilizer.

4. Nutritious Food

Food cooked in the Sport is actually more nutritious than food cooked by many other methods.  Meats are cooked without adding any additional oil.  Vegetables and fruits are cooked without adding water.  (When water that vegetables and fruits have been cooked in is poured off, some of the vitamins and minerals are poured off also.)  With solar cooking the nutritional value stays right in the food.  Because of the slow method of cooking, the food is more tender and therefore more easily digested by seniors and small children.  In addition, foods do not burn or easily overcook and need not be stirred or watched.  One can even bake bread in a solar oven.

5. Time Saver

In many parts of the world, the search for fuel for cooking takes up to seven hours each day.  This time and energy could be better time spent with family members, improving health conditions, and increasing food supplies.  A solar oven can be used year-round in the tropics and six to eight months of the year in many areas of the world.  With reflectors and superior insulation, the Sport even performs well in below zero weather.

6. Budget Helper

The majority of families in developing countries are both paying for fuel and gathering fuel.  Fewer do just one or the other.  The families spend one US dollar a day for fuel – firewood, charcoal, propane, kerosene, or (more expensive) electricity.

The solar oven can help reduce the 13 to 18 million deaths each year due to hunger and malnutrition worldwide.  Fuel savings will help the family food budget.