Quality Matters: The Importance of Cookstove Standards
Whether we realize it or not, standards exist everywhere in the world and help to frame, guide, and normalize many areas of our lives. Date and time formatting, food safety, and fuel specifications are just a few examples of areas in which standards exist. Engineering or building codes spell out legal requirements and may refer to standards that tell you how to comply with the requirements. Consensus standards are not simply trivial collections of recommendations, but rather minimum requirements to ensure the safety, quality, and reliability of products and services (Source). Many internationally recognized standards have existed for decades and are updated regularly through international bodies like the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
International standards for testing cookstoves, on the other hand, have been around for only a few years (Source and Source). This recent focus is largely the result of a better understanding of the negative impact of air pollutant emissions and a drive to improve the environment and health globally. While it may seem simple to establish baseline performance and safety requirements for cookstoves, many challenges exist, including the wide variability of cooking styles. For example, switching directly from a charcoal-fired stove to an electric stove may be the most straightforward path to improving indoor air, but it isn’t as simple as it would seem for much of the world. Clean cooking technology may differ across fuel type, cookstove type, and access or preference regionally; hence a “one size fits all” transition is not possible (Source). Small improvements toward increased adoption of clean stoves and replacement of dirty cookstoves can have profound impacts on occupant health, and benefits can reach across ten Sustainable Development Goals (Source). To compare and measure the benefits of improved cookstoves, a definition of “improvement” is imperative; cookstove testing standards provide that clarification.
How cookstove standards work
The first internationally recognized cookstove testing standard was published in 2018 by ISO Technical Committee (TC) 285, Clean Cooking Solutions (Source); Pivot joined this group in the first part of 2022. Over five years, countries and international experts worked in TC 285 to share research and eventually publish the first standard: ISO 19867 (2018): Clean cookstoves and clean cooking solutions – Harmonized laboratory test protocols (Source).
Jim Jetter, the current Convenor of an ISO Working Group developing a new standard for testing institutional cookstoves, was the Project Leader for ISO 19867. In an interview with Jetter, he emphasized that these voluntary standards may be adopted or adapted by countries and used as tools for success. Where Part 1 of the standard includes test sequences for particulate and gaseous air pollutant emissions, energy efficiency, safety, and durability, Part 3 provides voluntary performance targets for those tests (Source and Source). Performance tiers provide an incremental approach to bench-marking the potential performance of clean cooking solutions. The tiered approach in Part 3 rates a cookstove across efficiency/fuel use, air pollutant emissions (carbon monoxide and fine particulate matter), safety, and durability from 0-5. A zero rating represents the performance of a typical open/three stone fire, while a five rating represents ideal performance. This tier system provides individual ratings for each performance category, rather than an overall ranking, to meet needs of different applications. For example, for programs related to fuel savings, an energy efficient stove would be the focus; for programs related to health, high emission stoves might be avoided. Ideally, technologies would score top ratings in each category, but in reality, this is not always practical. Performance must be balanced with cost, availability, and meeting the varied needs of stove users.
Standards in practice
Along with leading the development of international standards, Jetter conducts research at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Household Energy Laboratory in North Carolina, USA (Source). EPA-sponsored STAR Grants (2013-2018) helped quantify air quality and climatic impacts of combustion for cooking, heating, and lighting; results have been published in many scientific journal articles (Source). These studies, among others around the world, revealed differences in results between field and laboratory testing. One of the recipients of those grants was the Hannigan Air Quality and Technology Research Laboratory at the University of Colorado Boulder (Source). Evan Coffey, Sr. Research Assistant in the Hannigan Lab since 2013, served as the lead field engineer on two large-scale household energy interventions in Ghana. Evan’s work, similar to the work of other STAR Grant recipients, found that emission factors for cookstoves vary across regions, stove designs, fuels, seasons, and individual operators (Source 1, Source 2, and Source 3). Such variability showed limitations of laboratory tests as a true measure of improvement in the field. Emissions often differed in both magnitude and composition between field and lab tests; as a result, not all ‘improved cookstoves’ would actually have lower emissions than traditional fires when used by cooks in real world settings (Source 1, Source 2, and Source 3). Where improved cookstoves did exist, the prevalence of ‘stove stacking’ and ‘fuel stacking’ (using multiple stoves or fuels for different tasks) would undermine the predicted health and environmental impacts (Source). Many inconsistencies were discovered through the various studies. Coffey emphasizes the need for testing standards in clean cooking, “when I first began my research, there weren’t even definitions for parts of a cookstove nor was there consistent terminology to describe the performance of cookstoves,” but also noted that “standards are built to be adaptable and flexible in order to be achieved,” especially when “human behavior and the environment cannot be controlled.” Coffey’s work, alongside many others, eventually supported the development of ISO 19869 (2019) - Field testing methods, and provided guidelines on best practices for quantifying improvements to indoor air quality (Source).
Looking to the future
Over the last decade, tremendous strides have been made in the cookstove ecosystem, but much work remains to be done. By transitioning to cleaner, more efficient fuels and cookstoves, we can transform the way the world cooks - saving lives, improving livelihoods, empowering women, and protecting the environment simultaneously. The way forward for cookstove testing standards is through ISO Technical Committee 285’s continuous improvement approach, with refinement of existing standards and development of additional standards when necessary. Ongoing efforts are supporting education and implementation of these standards through partners including EPA, ISO, the World Health Organization and the Clean Cooking Alliance: providing tools for policymakers, incentives for manufacturers, information for consumers, and capacity building activities for organizations. TC 285 is developing Guidelines for Social Impact Assessment (Source) to better understand the social impacts of this transition, such as decreased time poverty, increased energy security, and improved health. As technology changes, cookstove testing standards will too; regardless, standards will remain key to the success of sustainable development in the years ahead.
