MIT’s Low-Tech Approach to Fixing the World

When award-winning MIT engineer Amy Smith visited the Peruvian village of Compone in the Sacred Valley of the Incas, she had a humble goal: turning the corncobs that the farmers use to power their cooking stoves and heat their homes into charcoal. The smoke produced from corncobs and other raw biomass is thick and dirty, making respiratory infections from indoor fires the leading cause of death for children under 5. Charcoal, on the other hand, burns much more cleanly. So Smith and two others lugged bags of tools and low-tech gadgets, water-testing equipment and a pedal-powered grain mill out to Compone from the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

From Popular Mechanics:

The charcoal project is the responsibility of Mary Hong, a 19-year-old branching out beyond her aerospace major this semester. She and the other students, coincidentally all women, are enrolled in Smith’s D-Lab, a course that is becoming quietly famous beyond the MIT campus in Cambridge, Mass. The D is for development, design and dissemination; last fall, more than 100 students applied for about 30 slots. To prepare for their field work, D-Lab students live for a week in Cambridge on $2 per day. (Smith joins in.) Right now, eight more D-Lab teams are plying jungle rivers, hiking goat trails and hailing chicken buses in seven additional countries—Brazil, Honduras, Ghana, Tanzania, Zambia, India and China. In Smith’s view, even harsh aspects of Third World travel have their benefits. “If you get a good bout of diarrhea from a waterborne disease,” she says, “you really understand what it means to have access to clean drinking water.”

Smith succeeded in her charcoal goal, helping to further prove that improving standards of living in developing countries can be done with low-tech engineering on as little as $2 a day. Smith’s unique approach to hunger and other problems affecting people like the farmers of Compone has inspired a movement toward simple technology. Green, cheap and low tech – pure awesome.

Link [Popular Mechanics]

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