Dr. Larry Winiarski has devoted his life to promoting a variety of clean and efficient household technologies. His crowning achievement, and the one for which he is most proud, is his rocket stove invention and its wide scale adoption in developing countries. Hundreds of thousands of stoves have been made using his technology.
Larry’s strategy to ensure wide-scale adoption is based on adapting the technology to use local materials, construction skills, and machinery in order to produce models appropriate to the local market niche and cost range. He has freely shared this technology with the whole world, and worked to stop any patenting or exclusive rights in order to ensure a sustainable commercial supply of stoves at a fair price. He travels around the work to teach individuals and groups about the rocket stove principles and help them start small, local shops and factories. “You can have a good stove,” he advises, “but you also need good training and follow-up.”
Larry has been an active member of ETHOS (Engineers for Technical and Humanitarian Opportunities of Service) and PCIA, and sees networking as the most useful aspect of the 2009 PCIA Forum. He values building relationships. “If someone with status in the community is against your project,” he says, “the peer pressure can kill it.” He credits PCIA for supporting his travel to Uganda, which also allowed him to spend time in Northern Uganda to work with AidAfrica, for whom he serves as Board Member.
In the next few years Larry will continue his work on stoves, including the development of a rocket incinerator, while also focusing on another household killer: unclean drinking water. He is currently developing and testing water pumping and hand-operated well drilling technologies. He notes that the most exciting part of his work is making a difference, which we see he clearly does on a regular basis.
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Grandfather of Rocket Stoves |