0:00:00.000,0:00:02.000
In terms of invention,

0:00:02.000,0:00:05.000
I'd like to tell you the tale of one of my favorite projects.

0:00:05.000,0:00:08.000
I think it's one of the most exciting that I'm working on,

0:00:08.000,0:00:10.000
but I think it's also the simplest.

0:00:10.000,0:00:14.000
It's a project that has the potential to make a huge impact around the world.

0:00:14.000,0:00:18.000
It addresses one of the biggest health issues on the planet,

0:00:18.000,0:00:21.000
the number one cause of death in children under five,

0:00:21.000,0:00:26.000
which is ... ? Water-borne diseases? Diarrhea? Malnutrition?

0:00:26.000,0:00:32.000
No, it's breathing the smoke from indoor cooking fires --

0:00:32.000,0:00:37.000
acute respiratory infections caused by this. Can you believe that?

0:00:37.000,0:00:40.000
I find this shocking and somewhat appalling.

0:00:40.000,0:00:43.000
Can't we make cleaner burning cooking fuels?

0:00:43.000,0:00:45.000
Can't we make better stoves?

0:00:45.000,0:00:49.000
How is it that this can lead to over two million deaths every year?

0:00:49.000,0:00:51.000
I know Bill Joy was talking to you

0:00:51.000,0:00:53.000
about the wonders of carbon nanotubes,

0:00:53.000,0:00:55.000
so I'm going to talk to you about

0:00:55.000,0:00:59.000
the wonders of carbon macro-tubes, which is charcoal.

0:01:01.000,0:01:06.000
So this is a picture of rural Haiti. Haiti is now 98 percent deforested.

0:01:06.000,0:01:09.000
You'll see scenes like this all over the island.

0:01:09.000,0:01:12.000
It leads to all sorts of environmental problems

0:01:12.000,0:01:17.000
and problems that affect people throughout the nation.

0:01:17.000,0:01:19.000
A couple years ago there was severe flooding

0:01:19.000,0:01:20.000
that led to thousands of deaths --

0:01:20.000,0:01:22.000
that's directly attributable to the fact

0:01:22.000,0:01:25.000
that there are no trees on the hills to stabilize the soil.

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So the rains come, they go down the rivers, and the flooding happens.

0:01:30.000,0:01:33.000
Now one of the reasons why there are so few trees is this:

0:01:33.000,0:01:36.000
people need to cook, and they harvest wood

0:01:36.000,0:01:39.000
and they make charcoal in order to do it.

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It's not that people are ignorant to the environmental damage.

0:01:42.000,0:01:45.000
They know perfectly well, but they have no other choice.

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Fossil fuels are not available,

0:01:47.000,0:01:52.000
and solar energy doesn't cook the way that they like their food prepared.

0:01:52.000,0:01:54.000
And so this is what they do.

0:01:54.000,0:01:58.000
You'll find families like this who go out into the forest to find a tree,

0:01:58.000,0:02:01.000
cut it down and make charcoal out of it.

0:02:02.000,0:02:05.000
So not surprisingly, there's a lot of effort

0:02:05.000,0:02:09.000
that's been done to look at alternative cooking fuels.

0:02:09.000,0:02:12.000
About four years ago I took a team of students down to Haiti,

0:02:12.000,0:02:15.000
and we worked with Peace Corps volunteers there.

0:02:15.000,0:02:17.000
This is one such volunteer,

0:02:17.000,0:02:20.000
and this is a device that he had built in the village where he worked.

0:02:20.000,0:02:22.000
And the idea was that you could take waste paper;

0:02:22.000,0:02:26.000
you could compress it; and make briquettes that could be used for fuel.

0:02:26.000,0:02:28.000
But this device was very slow.

0:02:28.000,0:02:31.000
So our engineering students went to work on it,

0:02:31.000,0:02:34.000
and with some very simple changes,

0:02:34.000,0:02:37.000
they were able to triple the throughput of this device.

0:02:37.000,0:02:39.000
So you could imagine they were very excited about it.

0:02:39.000,0:02:43.000
And they took the briquettes back to MIT so that they could test them.

0:02:43.000,0:02:48.000
And one of the things that they found was they didn't burn.

0:02:48.000,0:02:51.000
So it was a little discouraging to the students.

0:02:52.000,0:02:56.000
And in fact if you look closely, right here,

0:02:56.000,0:02:58.000
you can see it says, "U.S. Peace Corps."

0:02:58.000,0:03:02.000
As it turns out, there actually wasn't any waste paper in this village.

0:03:02.000,0:03:06.000
And while it was a good use of government paperwork

0:03:06.000,0:03:08.000
for this volunteer to bring it back with him to his village (Laughter),

0:03:08.000,0:03:10.000
it was 800 kilometers away.

0:03:10.000,0:03:14.000
And so we thought perhaps there might be a better way

0:03:14.000,0:03:16.000
to come up with an alternative cooking fuel.

0:03:16.000,0:03:19.000
What we wanted to do is we wanted to make a fuel

0:03:19.000,0:03:22.000
that used something that was readily available on the local level.

0:03:22.000,0:03:26.000
You see these all over Haiti as well. They're small-scale sugar mills.

0:03:26.000,0:03:27.000
And the waste product from them

0:03:27.000,0:03:31.000
after you extract the juice from the sugarcane is called "bagasse."

0:03:31.000,0:03:34.000
It has no other use. It has no nutritional value,

0:03:34.000,0:03:36.000
so they don't feed it to the animals.

0:03:36.000,0:03:40.000
It just sits in a pile near the sugar mill until eventually they burn it.

0:03:40.000,0:03:43.000
What we wanted to do was we wanted to find a way

0:03:43.000,0:03:46.000
to harness this waste resource and turn it into a fuel

0:03:46.000,0:03:49.000
that would be something that people could easily cook with,

0:03:49.000,0:03:51.000
something like charcoal.

0:03:51.000,0:03:56.000
So over the next couple of years, students and I worked to develop a process.

0:03:56.000,0:04:00.000
So you start with the bagasse, and then you take a very simple kiln

0:04:00.000,0:04:03.000
that you can make out of a waste fifty five-gallon oil drum.

0:04:03.000,0:04:07.000
After some time, after setting it on fire, you seal it

0:04:07.000,0:04:10.000
to restrict the oxygen that goes into the kiln,

0:04:10.000,0:04:14.000
and then you end up with this carbonized material here.

0:04:14.000,0:04:16.000
However, you can't burn this. It's too fine

0:04:16.000,0:04:20.000
and it burns too quickly to be useful for cooking.

0:04:20.000,0:04:24.000
So we had to try to find a way to form it into useful briquettes.

0:04:24.000,0:04:27.000
And conveniently, one of my students was from Ghana,

0:04:27.000,0:04:32.000
and he remembered a dish his mom used to make for him called "kokonte,"

0:04:32.000,0:04:35.000
which is a very sticky porridge made out of the cassava root.

0:04:35.000,0:04:37.000
And so what we did was we looked, and we found

0:04:37.000,0:04:41.000
that cassava is indeed grown in Haiti, under the name of "manioc."

0:04:41.000,0:04:43.000
And in fact, it's grown all over the world --

0:04:43.000,0:04:47.000
yucca, tapioca, manioc, cassava, it's all the same thing --

0:04:47.000,0:04:49.000
a very starchy root vegetable.

0:04:49.000,0:04:52.000
And you can make a very thick, sticky porridge out of it,

0:04:52.000,0:04:56.000
which you can use to bind together the charcoal briquettes.

0:04:56.000,0:04:59.000
So we did this. We went down to Haiti.

0:04:59.000,0:05:02.000
These are the graduates of the first Ecole de Chabon,

0:05:02.000,0:05:04.000
or Charcoal Institute. And these --

0:05:04.000,0:05:06.000
(Laughter)

0:05:06.000,0:05:11.000
-- that's right. So I'm actually an instructor at MIT as well as CIT.

0:05:11.000,0:05:15.000
And these are the briquettes that we made.

0:05:15.000,0:05:20.000
Now I'm going to take you to a different continent. This is India,

0:05:20.000,0:05:25.000
and this is the most commonly used cooking fuel in India; it's cow dung.

0:05:25.000,0:05:29.000
And more than in Haiti, this produces really smoky fires,

0:05:29.000,0:05:32.000
and this is where you see the health impacts

0:05:32.000,0:05:36.000
of cooking with cow dung and biomass as a fuel.

0:05:36.000,0:05:39.000
Kids and women are especially affected by it,

0:05:39.000,0:05:41.000
because they're the ones who are around the cooking fires.

0:05:41.000,0:05:44.000
So we wanted to see if we could introduce

0:05:44.000,0:05:46.000
this charcoal-making technology there.

0:05:46.000,0:05:49.000
Well unfortunately, they didn't have sugarcane

0:05:49.000,0:05:52.000
and they didn't have cassava, but that didn't stop us.

0:05:52.000,0:05:56.000
What we did was we found what were the locally available sources of biomass.

0:05:56.000,0:05:59.000
And there was wheat straw and there was rice straw in this area.

0:05:59.000,0:06:01.000
And what we could use as a binder

0:06:01.000,0:06:03.000
was actually small amounts of cow manure,

0:06:03.000,0:06:06.000
which they used ordinarily for their fuel.

0:06:06.000,0:06:10.000
And we did side-by-side tests, and here you can see

0:06:10.000,0:06:13.000
the charcoal briquettes and here the cow dung.

0:06:13.000,0:06:16.000
And you can see that it's a lot cleaner burning of a cooking fuel.

0:06:16.000,0:06:19.000
And in fact, it heats the water a lot more quickly.

0:06:19.000,0:06:21.000
And so we were very happy, thus far.

0:06:21.000,0:06:23.000
But one of the things that we found

0:06:23.000,0:06:26.000
was when we did side-by-side comparisons with wood charcoal,

0:06:26.000,0:06:29.000
it didn't burn as long. And the briquettes crumbled a little bit,

0:06:29.000,0:06:32.000
and we lost energy as they fell apart as they were cooking.

0:06:32.000,0:06:36.000
So we wanted to try to find a way to make a stronger briquette

0:06:36.000,0:06:40.000
so that we could compete with wood charcoal in the markets in Haiti.

0:06:40.000,0:06:44.000
So we went back to MIT, we took out the Instron machine,

0:06:44.000,0:06:47.000
and we figured out what sort of forces did you need

0:06:47.000,0:06:49.000
in order to compress a briquette to the level

0:06:49.000,0:06:52.000
that you actually are getting improved performance out of it?

0:06:52.000,0:06:56.000
And at the same time that we had students in the lab looking at this,

0:06:56.000,0:07:02.000
we also had community partners in Haiti working to develop the process,

0:07:02.000,0:07:08.000
to improve it and to make it more accessible to people in the villages there.

0:07:08.000,0:07:10.000
And after some time,

0:07:10.000,0:07:15.000
we developed a low-cost press that allows you to produce charcoal,

0:07:15.000,0:07:22.000
which actually now burns longer, cleaner than wood charcoal.

0:07:22.000,0:07:26.000
So now we're in a situation where we have a product, which is actually better

0:07:26.000,0:07:29.000
than what you can buy in Haiti in the marketplace,

0:07:29.000,0:07:32.000
which is a very wonderful place to be.

0:07:33.000,0:07:39.000
In Haiti alone, about 30 million trees are cut down every year.

0:07:39.000,0:07:41.000
There's a possibility of this being implemented

0:07:41.000,0:07:43.000
and saving a good portion of those.

0:07:43.000,0:07:49.000
In addition, the revenue generated from that charcoal is 260 million dollars.

0:07:49.000,0:07:52.000
That's an awful lot for a country of Haiti --

0:07:52.000,0:07:54.000
with a population of eight million

0:07:54.000,0:07:58.000
and an average income of less than 400 dollars.

0:07:58.000,0:08:03.000
So this is where we're also moving ahead with our charcoal project.

0:08:03.000,0:08:05.000
And one of the things that I think is also interesting,

0:08:05.000,0:08:10.000
is I have a friend up at UC Berkeley who's been doing risk analysis.

0:08:10.000,0:08:13.000
And he's looked at the problem of the health impacts

0:08:13.000,0:08:15.000
of burning wood versus charcoal.

0:08:15.000,0:08:17.000
And he's found that worldwide,

0:08:17.000,0:08:21.000
you could prevent a million deaths switching from wood to charcoal

0:08:21.000,0:08:23.000
as a cooking fuel. That's remarkable,

0:08:23.000,0:08:26.000
but up until now, there weren't ways to do it without cutting down trees.

0:08:26.000,0:08:28.000
But now we have a way

0:08:28.000,0:08:32.000
that's using an agricultural waste material to create a cooking fuel.

0:08:32.000,0:08:34.000
One of the really exciting things, though,

0:08:34.000,0:08:37.000
is something that came out of the trip that I took to Ghana just last month.

0:08:37.000,0:08:40.000
And this is, I think, the coolest thing,

0:08:40.000,0:08:43.000
and it's even lower tech than what you just saw,

0:08:43.000,0:08:46.000
if you can imagine such a thing. Here it is.

0:08:46.000,0:08:51.000
So what is this? This is corncobs turned into charcoal.

0:08:51.000,0:08:54.000
And the beauty of this is that you don't need to form briquettes --

0:08:54.000,0:08:58.000
it comes ready made. This is my $100 laptop, right here.

0:08:58.000,0:09:01.000
And actually, like Nick, I brought samples.

0:09:01.000,0:09:04.000
(Laughter)

0:09:04.000,0:09:06.000
So we can pass these around.

0:09:07.000,0:09:12.000
They're fully functional, field-tested, ready to roll out.

0:09:15.000,0:09:20.000
And I think one of the things, which is also remarkable about this technology,

0:09:20.000,0:09:24.000
is that the technology transfer is so easy.

0:09:24.000,0:09:26.000
Compared to the sugarcane charcoal,

0:09:26.000,0:09:29.000
where we actually have to teach people how to form it into briquettes

0:09:29.000,0:09:31.000
and you have the extra step of cooking the binder,

0:09:31.000,0:09:33.000
this comes pre-briquetted.

0:09:33.000,0:09:36.000
And this is about the most exciting thing in my life right now,

0:09:36.000,0:09:39.000
which is perhaps a sad commentary on my life.

0:09:39.000,0:09:41.000
(Laughter)

0:09:41.000,0:09:44.000
But once you see it, like you guys in the front row, all right,

0:09:44.000,0:09:46.000
yeah, OK. So anyway --

0:09:46.000,0:09:48.000
(Laughter)

0:09:48.000,0:09:52.000
-- here it is. And this is I think a perfect example

0:09:52.000,0:09:57.000
of what Robert Wright was talking about in those non-zero-sum things.

0:09:57.000,0:10:00.000
So not only do you have health benefits,

0:10:00.000,0:10:02.000
you have environmental benefits.

0:10:02.000,0:10:05.000
But this is one of the incredibly rare situations

0:10:05.000,0:10:08.000
where you also have economic benefits.

0:10:08.000,0:10:12.000
People can make their own cooking fuel from waste products.

0:10:12.000,0:10:14.000
They can generate income from this.

0:10:14.000,0:10:17.000
They can save the money that they were going to spend on charcoal,

0:10:17.000,0:10:19.000
and they can produce excess and sell it in the market

0:10:19.000,0:10:21.000
to people who aren't making their own.

0:10:21.000,0:10:23.000
It's really rare that you don't have trade-offs

0:10:23.000,0:10:27.000
between health and economics, or environment and economics.

0:10:27.000,0:10:30.000
So this is a project that I just find extremely exciting,

0:10:30.000,0:10:36.000
and I'm really looking forward to see where it takes us.

0:10:37.000,0:10:41.000
So when we talk about, now, the future we will create,

0:10:41.000,0:10:44.000
one of the things that I think is necessary

0:10:44.000,0:10:48.000
is to have a very clear vision of the world that we live in.

0:10:48.000,0:10:52.000
And now I don't actually mean the world that we live in.

0:10:52.000,0:10:56.000
I mean the world where women spend two to three hours everyday

0:10:56.000,0:10:59.000
grinding grain for their families to eat.

0:10:59.000,0:11:02.000
I mean the world where advanced building materials

0:11:02.000,0:11:05.000
means cement roofing tiles that are made by hand,

0:11:05.000,0:11:08.000
and where, when you work 10 hours a day,

0:11:08.000,0:11:11.000
you're still only earning 60 dollars in a month.

0:11:12.000,0:11:20.000
I mean the world where women and children spend 40 billion hours a year fetching water.

0:11:20.000,0:11:24.000
That's as if the entire workforce of the State of California

0:11:24.000,0:11:28.000
worked full time for a year doing nothing but fetching water.

0:11:28.000,0:11:33.000
It's a place where, for example, if this were India,

0:11:33.000,0:11:36.000
in this room, only three of us would have a car.

0:11:36.000,0:11:37.000
If this were Afghanistan,

0:11:37.000,0:11:41.000
only one person in this room would know how the use the Internet.

0:11:41.000,0:11:46.000
If this were Zambia, 300 of you would be farmers,

0:11:46.000,0:11:49.000
100 of you would have AIDS or HIV.

0:11:49.000,0:11:53.000
And more than half of you would be living on less than a dollar a day.

0:11:53.000,0:11:58.000
These are the issues that we need to come up with solutions for.

0:11:58.000,0:12:03.000
These are the issues that we need to be training our engineers,

0:12:03.000,0:12:07.000
our designers, our business people, our entrepreneurs to be facing.

0:12:07.000,0:12:10.000
These are the solutions that we need to find.

0:12:10.000,0:12:15.000
I have a few areas that I believe are especially important that we address.

0:12:15.000,0:12:21.000
One of them is creating technologies to promote micro-finance and micro-enterprise,

0:12:21.000,0:12:25.000
so that people who are living below the poverty line can find a way to move out --

0:12:25.000,0:12:27.000
and that they're not doing it

0:12:27.000,0:12:31.000
using the same traditional basket making, poultry rearing, etc.

0:12:31.000,0:12:34.000
But there are new technologies and new products

0:12:34.000,0:12:36.000
that they can make on a small scale.

0:12:36.000,0:12:41.000
The next thing I believe is that we need to create technologies for poor farmers

0:12:41.000,0:12:44.000
to add value to their own crops.

0:12:44.000,0:12:47.000
And we need to rethink our development strategies,

0:12:47.000,0:12:51.000
so that we're not promoting educational campaigns

0:12:51.000,0:12:53.000
to get them to stop being farmers,

0:12:53.000,0:12:56.000
but rather to stop being poor farmers.

0:12:56.000,0:12:59.000
And we need to think about how we can do that effectively.

0:12:59.000,0:13:02.000
We need to work with the people in these communities,

0:13:02.000,0:13:05.000
and give them the resources and the tools that they need

0:13:05.000,0:13:08.000
to solve their own problems. That's the best way to do it.

0:13:08.000,0:13:10.000
We shouldn't be doing it from outside.

0:13:10.000,0:13:15.000
So we need to create this future, and we need to start doing it now.

0:13:15.000,0:13:17.000
Thank you.

0:13:17.000,0:13:26.000
(Applause)

0:13:26.000,0:13:29.000
Chris Anderson: Tell us -- just while we see if someone has a question --

0:13:29.000,0:13:32.000
just tell us about one of the other things that you've worked on.

0:13:32.000,0:13:34.000
Amy Smith: A couple of other things that we're working on

0:13:34.000,0:13:37.000
are looking at ways to do low-cost water quality testing,

0:13:37.000,0:13:40.000
so that communities can maintain their own water systems,

0:13:40.000,0:13:43.000
know when they're working, know when they treat them, etc.

0:13:43.000,0:13:45.000
We're also looking at low-cost water treatment systems.

0:13:45.000,0:13:49.000
One of the really exciting things is looking at solar water disinfection

0:13:49.000,0:13:52.000
and improving the ability to be able to do that.

0:13:52.000,0:13:56.000
CA: What's the bottleneck to preventing this stuff getting from scale?

0:13:56.000,0:13:59.000
Do you need to find entrepreneurs, or venture capitalists,

0:13:59.000,0:14:04.000
or what do you need to take what you've got and get it to scale?

0:14:04.000,0:14:07.000
AS: Yeah, I think its large numbers of people moving it forward.

0:14:07.000,0:14:10.000
It's a difficult thing; it's a marketplace which is very fragmented

0:14:10.000,0:14:12.000
and a consumer population with no income.

0:14:12.000,0:14:16.000
So you can't use the same models that you use in the United States

0:14:16.000,0:14:18.000
for making things move forward.

0:14:18.000,0:14:21.000
And we're a pretty small staff, which is me.

0:14:21.000,0:14:22.000
(Laughter)

0:14:22.000,0:14:25.000
So, you know, I do what I can with the students.

0:14:25.000,0:14:27.000
We have 30 students a year go out into the field

0:14:27.000,0:14:29.000
and try to implement this and move it forward.

0:14:29.000,0:14:33.000
The other thing is you have to do things with a long time frame,

0:14:33.000,0:14:37.000
as -- you know, you can't expect to get something done in a year or two years;

0:14:37.000,0:14:39.000
you have to be looking five or 10 years ahead.

0:14:39.000,0:14:43.000
But I think with the vision to do that, we can move forward.