One Earth Designs (OED) is a social enterprise located in Boston, Massachusetts, Hong Kong, Beijing, 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 Dutch Postcode Lottery Green Challenge, 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
- June 2013: One Earth Designs aligns with Kickstarter to promote the SolSource S2 parabolic solar cooker. An article in gizmag explains that those wishing to help this fledgling company are offered the opportunity to purchase a cooker for $249 USD, with free shipping in the continental USA. The projected retail price will be $399 USD, so this is a great way to help them out, and get a great deal. Delivery of the cookers will happen in October 2013. More information...
- April 2013: Solar cooking advocate, Pat McArdle, and John Linquist of One Earth Designs, demonstrated the companies' SolSource S1 parabolic cooker at the National Sustainable Design Expo., held each year in April on the Washington D.C. mall. John had the opportunity to demonstrate the cooker to Jacob Moss, senior State Department coordinator for the Clean Cookstove Initiative. EPA officials who were running the expo. told us the the SolSource is their greatest success story.
- 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.
- 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
- June 2013: Solar Cooking Cuts Rural Dependency on Biomass Fuels - Laboratory Equipment
- January 2011: Young Utah engineer tackles world’s toughest problems - The Salt Lake Tribune
- August 2009: Research Projects for People Prosperity and the Planet - EPA
- June 2009: Global Service Blog - Change.Org
- June 2009: Seed Grant Awards - Legatum Center
- May 2009: SolSource 3-in-1: An Alternative Energy Solution - WordChanging
- May 2009: The SolSource Wins, 2009 - St Andrews Prize for the Environment
- April 2009: 2009 Awards - MIT IDEAS
- April 2009: SolSource Demonstration - Discovery Channel Daily Planet Interview
- March 2009: One Earth Designs - Make Magazine Blog
- October 2008: Five to Watch - Featured in Boston Globe
- July 2008: Utah native utilizing sun's rays in Asia - Deseret News
- June 2008: Harnessing the Tibetan sun - MIT News
- June 2008: How MIT made harnessing sun easier in Tibet - Mangalorean
Audio and video
See also
- SolSource 3-in-1
- SolSource S1
- SolSource S2
- Catlin Powers
- Scot Frank
External links