Envirofit offers clean energy solutions.
By Raif Karerat
After starting with a single cookstove in India eight years ago, to now offering clean energy solutions across five continents, Envirofit International recently celebrated its one-millionth customer.
Established in 2003, Envirofit’s enterprise-based model represents a new approach to development through the design and sale of high quality, affordable, consumer driven products that yield health, environmental and economic benefits.
In 2007, Envirofit turned its attention to clean cookstoves, partnering with Shell Foundation’s Breathing Space Program to prove the market for the development of a scalable clean cookstove solution, and began its pilot program in India the next year.
According to a report released by Envirofit entitled “Cooking in One Million Kitchens: Lessons Learned in Scaling a Clean Cookstove Business,” using a clean cookstove directly benefits consumers by improving health and household wellbeing.
Reducing smoke and toxic emissions by up to 80 percent means the effects of smoke, such as painful coughing and watery, burning eyes are noticeably alleviated. The company’s HM-5000 plancha stove has been shown to reduce household air pollution to 46 percent below the WHO standard.
Following the development of its woodstove, “Envirofit continued to combine the global knowledge of cooking cultures from field-based research with innovative clean cooking technologies to design new products using advanced computational tools, rigorous performance testing” to meet the demands of consumers in different markets,” according to its website.
Envirofit has overcome market barriers to create a successful for-profit social enterprise and continues to innovate through design, manufacturing and supply chain processes, resulting in an estimated $20 million in revenues for 2015.
Additionally, the company has helped to create 2,400 new jobs and prevented the release of 17 million tons of harmful CO2 emissions.
In 2009 the company won Time Magazine’s Heroes of the Environment Award followed by the Economist’s Energy and the Environment Innovators of the Year in 2013.
1 Comment
What a tremendous accomplishment!
Folks at Environfit made a wise decision when they switched their air pollution fight from dirty small engines to dirty small stoves that are poisoning the air in some parts of the World.