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In terms of invention,

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I'd like to tell you the tale
of one of my favorite projects.

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I think it's one of the most exciting
that I'm working on,

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but I think it's also the simplest.

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It's a project that has the potential
to make a huge impact around the world.

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It addresses one of the biggest
health issues on the planet,

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the number one cause of death
in children under five.

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Which is ...?

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Water-borne diseases?
Diarrhea? Malnutrition?

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No.

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It's breathing the smoke
from indoor cooking fires --

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acute respiratory infections
caused by this.

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Can you believe that?

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I find this shocking
and somewhat appalling.

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Can't we make
cleaner burning cooking fuels?

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Can't we make better stoves?

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How is it that this can lead
to over two million deaths every year?

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I know Bill Joy was talking to you
about the wonders of carbon nanotubes,

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so I'm going to talk to you
about the wonders of carbon macro-tubes,

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which is charcoal.

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(Laughter)

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So this is a picture of rural Haiti.

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Haiti is now 98 percent deforested.

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You'll see scenes like this
all over the island.

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It leads to all sorts
of environmental problems

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and problems that affect people
throughout the nation.

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A couple years ago
there was severe flooding

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that led to thousands of deaths --

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that's directly attributable to the fact

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that there are no trees on the hills
to stabilize the soil.

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So the rains come --

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they go down the rivers
and the flooding happens.

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Now one of the reasons
why there are so few trees is this:

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people need to cook,

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and they harvest wood
and they make charcoal in order to do it.

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

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They know perfectly well,
but they have no other choice.

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Fossil fuels are not available,

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and solar energy doesn't cook the way
that they like their food prepared.

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And so this is what they do.

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You'll find families like this who go out
into the forest to find a tree,

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cut it down and make charcoal out of it.

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So not surprisingly,

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there's a lot of effort that's been done
to look at alternative cooking fuels.

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About four years ago, I took
a team of students down to Haiti

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and we worked with
Peace Corps volunteers there.

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This is one such volunteer

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and this is a device that he had built
in the village where he worked.

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And the idea was
that you could take waste paper;

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you could compress it

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and make briquettes
that could be used for fuel.

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But this device was very slow.

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So our engineering students
went to work on it

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and with some very simple changes,

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they were able to triple
the throughput of this device.

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So you could imagine
they were very excited about it.

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And they took the briquettes back to MIT
so that they could test them.

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And one of the things
that they found was they didn't burn.

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So it was a little
discouraging to the students.

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(Laughter)

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And in fact, if you look closely,

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right here you can see
it says, "US Peace Corps."

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As it turns out, there actually wasn't
any waste paper in this village.

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And while it was a good use
of government paperwork

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for this volunteer to bring it
back with him to his village,

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it was 800 kilometers away.

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And so we thought perhaps
there might be a better way

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to come up with
an alternative cooking fuel.

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What we wanted to do
is we wanted to make a fuel

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that used something that was
readily available on the local level.

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You see these all over Haiti as well.

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They're small-scale sugar mills.

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And the waste product from them

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after you extract the juice
from the sugarcane

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is called "bagasse."

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It has no other use.

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It has no nutritional value,
so they don't feed it to the animals.

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It just sits in a pile near the sugar mill
until eventually they burn it.

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What we wanted to do was
we wanted to find a way

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to harness this waste resource
and turn it into a fuel

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that would be something
that people could easily cook with,

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something like charcoal.

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So over the next couple of years,

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students and I worked
to develop a process.

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So you start with the bagasse,
and then you take a very simple kiln

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that you can make out of
a waste fifty five-gallon oil drum.

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After some time, after setting it on fire,

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you seal it to restrict the oxygen
that goes into the kiln,

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and then you end up
with this carbonized material here.

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However, you can't burn this.

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It's too fine and it burns too quickly
to be useful for cooking.

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So we had to try to find a way
to form it into useful briquettes.

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And conveniently,
one of my students was from Ghana,

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and he remembered a dish his mom
used to make for him called "kokonte,"

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which is a very sticky porridge
made out of the cassava root.

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And so what we did was we looked,

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and we found that cassava
is indeed grown in Haiti,

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under the name of "manioc."

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In fact, it's grown all over the world --

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yucca, tapioca, manioc, cassava,
it's all the same thing --

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a very starchy root vegetable.

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And you can make a very thick,
sticky porridge out of it,

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which you can use to bind together
the charcoal briquettes.

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So we did this. We went down to Haiti.

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These are the graduates
of the first Ecole de Charbon,

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or Charcoal Institute.

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And these --

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(Laughter)

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That's right. So I'm actually
an instructor at MIT as well as CIT.

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And these are the briquettes that we made.

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Now I'm going to take you
to a different continent.

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This is India

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and this is the most commonly used
cooking fuel in India.

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It's cow dung.

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And more than in Haiti,
this produces really smoky fires,

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and this is where you see
the health impacts

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of cooking with cow dung
and biomass as a fuel.

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Kids and women
are especially affected by it,

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because they're the ones
who are around the cooking fires.

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So we wanted to see

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if we could introduce
this charcoal-making technology there.

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Well, unfortunately,
they didn't have sugarcane

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and they didn't have cassava,

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but that didn't stop us.

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What we did was we found what were
the locally available sources of biomass.

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And there was wheat straw
and there was rice straw in this area.

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And what we could use as a binder
was actually small amounts of cow manure,

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which they used ordinarily for their fuel.

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And we did side-by-side tests,

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and here you can see
the charcoal briquettes

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and here the cow dung.

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And you can see that it's a lot cleaner
burning of a cooking fuel.

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And in fact, it heats the water
a lot more quickly.

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And so we were very happy, thus far.

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But one of the things that we found

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was when we did side-by-side
comparisons with wood charcoal,

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it didn't burn as long.

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And the briquettes crumbled a little bit

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and we lost energy as they fell apart
as they were cooking.

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So we wanted to try to find a way
to make a stronger briquette

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so that we could compete with
wood charcoal in the markets in Haiti.

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So we went back to MIT,

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we took out the Instron machine

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and we figured out
what sort of forces you needed

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in order to compress
a briquette to the level

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that you actually are getting
improved performance out of it?

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And at the same time that we had
students in the lab looking at this,

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we also had community partners in Haiti
working to develop the process,

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to improve it and make it more accessible
to people in the villages there.

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And after some time,

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we developed a low-cost press
that allows you to produce charcoal,

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which actually now burns not only --

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actually, it burns longer,
cleaner than wood charcoal.

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So now we're in a situation
where we have a product,

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which is actually better than what
you can buy in Haiti in the marketplace,

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which is a very wonderful place to be.

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In Haiti alone, about 30 million trees
are cut down every year.

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There's a possibility
of this being implemented

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and saving a good portion of those.

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In addition, the revenue generated
from that charcoal is 260 million dollars.

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That's an awful lot
for a country like Haiti --

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with a population of eight million

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and an average income
of less than 400 dollars.

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So this is where we're also moving ahead
with our charcoal project.

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And one of the things
that I think is also interesting,

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is I have a friend up at UC Berkeley
who's been doing risk analysis.

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And he's looked at the problem
of the health impacts

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of burning wood versus charcoal.

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And he's found that worldwide,
you could prevent a million deaths

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switching from wood
to charcoal as a cooking fuel.

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That's remarkable,

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but up until now, there weren't ways
to do it without cutting down trees.

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But now we have a way

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that's using an agricultural
waste material to create a cooking fuel.

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One of the really exciting things, though,

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is something that came out of the trip
that I took to Ghana just last month.

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And I think it's the coolest thing,

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and it's even lower tech
than what you just saw,

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if you can imagine such a thing.

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Here it is.

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So what is this?

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This is corncobs turned into charcoal.

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And the beauty of this is
that you don't need to form briquettes --

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it comes ready made.

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This is my $100 laptop, right here.

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And actually, like Nick,
I brought samples.

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(Laughter)

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So we can pass these around.

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They're fully functional,
field-tested, ready to roll out.

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(Laughter)

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And I think one of the things

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which is also remarkable
about this technology,

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is that the technology
transfer is so easy.

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Compared to the sugarcane charcoal,

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where we have to teach people
how to form it into briquettes

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and you have the extra step
of cooking the binder,

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this comes pre-briquetted.

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And this is about the most exciting
thing in my life right now,

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which is perhaps
a sad commentary on my life.

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(Laughter)

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But once you see it,
like you guys in the front row --

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All right, yeah, OK.

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So anyway --

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(Laughter)

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Here it is.

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And this is, I think, a perfect example

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of what Robert Wright was talking about
in those non-zero-sum things.

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So not only do you have health benefits,

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you have environmental benefits.

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But this is one
of the incredibly rare situations

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where you also have economic benefits.

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People can make their own cooking fuel
from waste products.

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They can generate income from this.

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They can save the money
that they were going to spend on charcoal

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and they can produce excess
and sell it in the market

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to people who aren't making their own.

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It's really rare
that you don't have trade-offs

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between health and economics,
or environment and economics.

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So this is a project
that I just find extremely exciting

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and I'm really looking forward
to see where it takes us.

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So when we talk about, now,
the future we will create,

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one of the things
that I think is necessary

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is to have a very clear vision
of the world that we live in.

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And now, I don't actually mean
the world that we live in.

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I mean the world where women
spend two to three hours everyday

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grinding grain for their families to eat.

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I mean the world
where advanced building materials

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means cement roofing tiles
that are made by hand,

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and where, when you work 10 hours a day,

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you're still only earning
60 dollars in a month.

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I mean the world

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where women and children spend
40 billion hours a year fetching water.

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That's as if the entire workforce
of the state of California

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worked full time for a year
doing nothing but fetching water.

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It's a place where,
for example, if this were India,

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in this room, only three of us
would have a car.

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If this were Afghanistan,

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only one person in this room
would know how the use the Internet.

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If this were Zambia --

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300 of you would be farmers,

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100 of you would have AIDS or HIV.

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And more than half of you would be living
on less than a dollar a day.

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These are the issues that we
need to come up with solutions for.

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These are the issues that
we need to be training our engineers,

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our designers, our business people,
our entrepreneurs to be facing.

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These are the solutions
that we need to find.

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I have a few areas that I believe
are especially important that we address.

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One of them is creating technologies

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to promote micro-finance
and micro-enterprise,

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so that people who are living
below the poverty line

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can find a way to move out --

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and that they're not doing it

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using the same traditional
basket making, poultry rearing, etc.

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But there are new technologies
and new products

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that they can make on a small scale.

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The next thing I believe

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is that we need to create
technologies for poor farmers

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to add value to their own crops.

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And we need to rethink
our development strategies,

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so that we're not promoting
educational campaigns

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to get them to stop being farmers,

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but rather to stop being poor farmers.

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And we need to think
about how we can do that effectively.

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We need to work with the people
in these communities

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and give them the resources
and the tools that they need

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to solve their own problems.

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That's the best way to do it.

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We shouldn't be doing it from outside.

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So we need to create this future,
and we need to start doing it now.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)

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Chris Anderson: Thank you, incredible.

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Stay here.

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Tell us -- just while we see
if someone has a question --

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just tell us about one of the other things
that you've worked on.

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Amy Smith: Some of the other
things we're working on

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are ways to do low-cost
water quality testing,

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so that communities can maintain
their own water systems,

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know when they're working,
know when they treat them, etc.

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We're also looking at low-cost
water-treatment systems.

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One of the really exciting things
is looking at solar water disinfection

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and improving the ability
to be able to do that.

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CA: What's the bottleneck
preventing this stuff getting from scale?

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Do you need to find entrepreneurs,
or venture capitalists,

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or what do you need to take
what you've got and get it to scale?

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AS: I think it's large numbers
of people moving it forward.

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It's a difficult thing --

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it's a marketplace
which is very fragmented

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and a consumer population with no income.

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So you can't use the same models
that you use in the United States

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for making things move forward.

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And we're a pretty small staff,

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which is me.

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(Laughter)

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So, you know,
I do what I can with the students.

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We have 30 students a year
go out into the field

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and try to implement this
and move it forward.

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The other thing is you have to do things
with a long time frame,

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as, you know, you can't expect to get
something done in a year or two years;

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you have to be looking
five or 10 years ahead.

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But I think with the vision to do that,
we can move forward.