Cooking up innovation
While Scot Frank ’08 was interning in China as part of the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) program in 2005, he visited the rural Himalayan plateau — which opened his eyes to an energy crisis. There, he learned, people cook and heat their homes using biomass fuels — namely, wood and yak dung. These fuels expel a climate-changing agent called black carbon and contribute to deadly indoor pollution, among other side effects.Now Frank’s startup, One Earth Designs — which has its roots at MIT — is helping end the Himalayan plateau’s dependency on biomass fuels by providing its people with solar-powered cooking devices.Released in December after years of tweaking, One Earth’s first cooker, dubbed SolSource, is already being used by roughly 4,000 people in the Himalayas. More than 2,000 additional orders have been placed across the world, says Frank, now the CEO of One Earth. Data suggest that...