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SolarCycle

From Solar Cooking

SolarCycle is based at Brown University, Providence, RI. They have developed a technology to convert waste plastic bags into panels that are then lined with reflective material from the inside of potato chip bags. They have also developed a trough-based water pasteurizer that can pasteurize 1000 liters of water per day. Micro-credit will be used to make these technologies affordable for the poor.

SolarCycle began in 2008 in response to the staggering environmental damage and negative health effects caused by contaminated drinking water and indoor air pollution in the developing world. Seeking to address this issue from the ground up with locallyavailable, low-cost materials, SolarCycle’s founders looked to the most unusual of raw materials - trash. We have designed a revolutionary material made from used plastic bags and the aluminized interior of chip bags, which will replace virgin plastics and mirrors in solar concentrating applications.

Using this “upcycled” manufacturing process, SolarCycle produces the most durable, sustainable, and financially accessible solar cookers and water pasteurizers on the market and turns an urban trash problem into a potential solution for diarrheal illnesses and respiratory diseases. We plan to market our products in Sub-Saharan Africa (beginning in Tanzania) through partnerships with microfinance groups.

While we ultimately plan to make a profit on the sale of our material, we are also creating economic opportunity on a local scale: a microentrepreneur could obtain a loan in order to purchase a pasteurizer and sell clean water as a business, or a woman could buy a batch of cookers and sell them at her roadside stand alongside food or crafts. Our marketing and sales team will focus on building NGO partnerships to facilitate the microfinance loans and our work with the local communities—from health education to installation workshops – that that will help promote our products, make the microentrepreneurs’ jobs easier, and, ultimately, improve villages’ health and welfare.

Contents

[edit] Mission

Respond to the need for alternative cooking technologies in Africa by manufacturing and distributing, at cost, simple and sustainable solar cooker made from locally available waste materials. A variety of solar ovens are already in use in a patchwork of locations across Africa. However, these ovens are too expensive and their distribution too localized to address the massive scope of the energy problem in rural Africa. These ovens contain two principal innovations, one structural and one material, that will allow SolarCycle to provide a sustainable and scalable solution to this challenge.

[edit] News and recent developments

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

SolarCycle's Website

[edit] Contact

Team Members:

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