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One Earth Designs (OED) is a social enterprise located in Boston, Massachusetts, Hong Kong, and Xining, western China. OED is an environmental technology company collaborating with Himalayan communities to promote environmental health and incubate local innovation and entrepreneurship. One of their primary projects is the SolSource 3-in-1, a portable, affordable, parabolic-type solar concentrator. It has been designed to cook, generate electricity, and heat materials for space heating. It can also be dismantled as quickly as a hiking tent and transported from home to field for the mid-day meal.Other work includes research into low-cost water testing, heat-retaining phase-change technology, and general support of education initiatives in the Himalayan Plateau.

OED has been widely recognized for its innovation by such prestigious awards as: the U.S. EPA’s People, Prosperity & the Planet Award, MIT’s IDEAS and $100K Social Entrepreneurship Competitions, the Muhammad Yunus Innovation Award, and the Lemelson Foundation’s International Technology Award.

News and recent developments

File:SolSource 2.jpg

The SolSource S2

  • November 2012: One Earth Designs (OED) introduces their new parabolic solar cooker - Working with rural communities in western China, One Earth Designs, a Beijing/Hong Kong-based company, founded by Americans Catlin Powers and Scot Frank, has developed the SolSource S1, a portable parabolic solar cooker designed for use by nomadic communities. The S1 can boil a liter of water in ten minutes. Durable and weather resistant materials ensure a longer lifespan. It has a total weight of 18 kilos including a sturdy base design capable of withstanding the high winds typically encountered in the Himalayas. OED’s other solar cooker design, the SolSource S2 will be the world's first temperature adjustable solar cooker with six discrete settings up to 1,000 degrees Celsius. It will provide users with the capacity to generate electricity, heat their homes, purify their water and cook with stored solar energy at night or on cloudy days.
Sol Source 3-in-1 photo 2-8-11

Latest version of the SolSource 3-in-1 solar appliance, Feb. 2011.

  • February 2011: A photo of a recent version of the SolSource 3-in-1 parabolic cooker.
  • February 2011: A team led by inventor Scot Frank has landed a spot in an entrepreneurial boot camp hosted by a group called the Unreasonable Institute. With the help of sixty world-class investors and entrepreneurs at this summer’s institute in Boulder, Colo., Frank hopes to bring the SolSource 3-in-1 stove to a mass market. Worldwide, pollution from combustion stoves used indoors sickens and kills more than 1 million every year. Many victims are children. More Information...
  • September, 2010: The SolSource solar oven wins 500K EU in the Green Challenge. Once again the SolSource 3-in-1 has impressed the jury, and won the Dutch, Postcode Lottery Green Challenge. The Postcode Lottery Green Challenge award is a startup competition run by the Dutch Postcode Lottery with 500,000 EU ($666,200 US) up for grabs for the winner and 200,000 EU ($260,500 US) for the runner-up. All entries must have the potential to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions in a measurable fashion. From an impressive field of young entrepreneurs, the jury chose 25-year old Scot Frank of One Earth Designs as the winner for his company’s SolSource solar oven. The SolSource 3-in-1 combination is a solar cooker, heater, and electricity generator. It was inspired by the time Frabj spent in the Himalayas (the product has been tested there for 3 years), where women spend many hours a day collecting dung and wood fuels for cooking and heating. This process leads to deforestation, and many tribes in the Himalayas are rapidly running out of their traditional fuel sources. Families also breathe toxic indoor air pollution from the fire. Indoor air pollution is one of the world’s biggest killers of children under five, claiming 1.6 million lives per year. More Information...

Articles in the media

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Contact

Catlin Powers
Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer

Email:catlin@oneearthdesigns.org
Web: http://www.oneearthdesigns.org