UKC

http://www.Greenheat.co.uk/

I saw the eco stove by Greenheat mentioned in High,but not reviewed,which gives off water vapour and carbon dioxide for emisions,and uses organic gell derived from
sugar-cane,and costs 16 pounds which seems amazing.It can be found on the website,along with things for fire lighting and barbacues,and other stuff.

Tim

In reply to Timmd:It can be found in the Outdoor collection section of Product Range.

Cheers
Tim

In reply to Timmd:

bump

In reply to Timmd: Any idea where to buy them?

In reply to Timmd: Pretty much any stove which burns hydrocarbon fuel (petrol, kerosene, meths) will give off mostly carbon dioxide and water vapour when it's working properly. Don't forget that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. With inadequate ventilation you can get carbon monoxide as well, which is poisonous. I suspect the eco stove would be just as likely to do this as any other - perhaps more so since it's not burning vapourised fuel. I suspect that would also make it quite slow in comparison to a pressured fuel stove. Any other "emissions" from a regular stove will most likely be due to additives or impurities in the fuel. Automotive fuels tend to have a lot of these, which is why things like Coleman fuel are probably better for cooking with. If you're really worried about "emissions" you could try some of their liquid fuel in your Trangia. I note that the main emissions comparison they make is with solid fuel tablets (like in the pocket Trangia), which I don't believe are particularly widely used. I reckon they're punting strictly at the low end of the market, and using a bit of scientific-sounding fluff to try to justify the "green" label and pull in a few gullible eco freaks with little or no understanding of the real issues.

If you really want an eco-friendly cooking system, collect some firewood. It's a renewable resource, there's no energy used in packaging or transporting it (except yours) and the solid residue consists largely of nutrients which are beneficial to the soil.

Probably the biggest impact an individual can have on reducing emissions from combustion processes would be to walk or cycle everywhere. If you already do that, hats off to you. Next would be to go to bed when it gets dark - to avoid using electric light or candles - and only eat uncooked fresh fruit and veg. After that there's not much left to do but kill yourself so you don't contribute to global warming by exhaling carbon dioxide!

In reply to thread:

The ONLY environmental benefit of this ethanol gel based fuel over meths or a properly tuned stove is that it is CO2 neutral i.e. The amount of CO2 emitted when it's burned is equal to the amount absorbed by the growing sugarcane plant it's made of...

So is the firewood suggested by Martin. Fossil fuels are also carbon neutral in the very very long term (100,000yrs) but we assume that if humans were not digging this up then this is a sink for removal of carbon. The quality of the emissions is a red herring.

In reply to Martin W:I have to admit that i don't know a lot about the chemisty behiend global warming,or much else,i did know that carbondioxide is a greenhouse gas,but they say it's carbon neutral,though i thought it'd probably caused less polution being produced than petrol and meths due to being derived from plants,and not having any drilling involved or refining processes,though i see that there would be likely to be some polution from making the gell.What would have to happen for carbon monoxide to be formed?

Tim

In reply to Timmd:

Actually the more I think about this product the more concerned I become at WWFFN's endorsement of this product... I'm gonna send them an email tonight and I'll copy it onto this thread for some ecological discussion later.

In reply to Paul Saunders:
The ONLY environmental benefit of this ethanol gel based fuel over meths or a properly tuned stove is that it is CO2 neutral i.e. The amount of CO2 emitted when it's burned is equal to the amount absorbed by the growing sugarcane plant it's made of...
So is the firewood suggested by Martin. Fossil fuels are also carbon neutral in the very very long term (100,000yrs) but we assume that if humans were not digging this up then this is a sink for removal of carbon. The quality of the emissions is a red herring.

Did they reply?
I've been looking through the web about the oil industry and pollution,and these are two sites that i've found out of thousands.

http://www.refineryreform.org/

http://www.vpirg.org/news/press_releases/pr_20010322_valdezanniv.html



I can't quite understand how using gell from (presumably) squashed sugar came can't be quite a lot less polluting being produced than oil,taking into account the exploration and transporting and refining involved.How am i wrong that the sugar cane will be at least a bit less polluting?

Cheers
Tim

In reply to Timmd:

Aha you want to consider the holistic approach?

All the other products produced from the same batch of oil refined to produce the stove fuel, (Petrol, Diesel, Gas Oil, Plastics, solvents) will have a different pollution fingerprint. So you could consider these as by products of producing stove fuel, then there's oil spills, transport etc. all of which have an environmental impact.

Contrast this with the sugarcane which is produced only to manufacture alcohol there are less by products to consider and most will be non toxic. NB their process will still involve harvesting with petrol/diesel machines and processing, transport etc. This makes it hard for them to really claim their product as carbon neutral.

Therefore you could say "As long as you don't buy plastics, drive a car or use oil based paints then you are polluting less with the ecofuel" if you do all these activities then burning stove fuel has no more environmental impact than eco fuel since if you take stove fuel (meths/paraffin) and the ecofuel on their own they both burn to water and CO2.

The other issue...

I really can't fault the companys quality with respect to their attitude to pollution and global warming they're so much better than most. I'm still concerned about the WWFN approval because if they convert tracts of land to monoculture of sugarcane, in areas such as Brazil then the cost is the biodiversity of these areas with a direct impact on wildlife. Surely at odds with the WWFN's constitution?

They didn't get back to me on this issue...

In reply to Timmd:

Carbon Monoxide is given off due to incomplete combustion of the fuel, ie if you don't get enough oxygen for combustion. So baddly ventilated stoves will give off Carbon Monoxide.

In reply to Paul Saunders:


Plus sugar cane is not grown in this country, while we do have a relatively nearby source of oil in the North Sea. So the transport involved could well be much further, and will involve either:
- air transport, resulting in (untaxed) fossil fuel combustion products being released high up in the atmosphere, which is widely regarded as being a bad thing, or
- sea transport, which uses cheap'n'dirty bunker fuel containing something like forty times the quantity of polluting contaminants as are allowed in the equivalent land-based transport fuels.

There is a balance to be drawn somewhere, but I don't know where it is. Even stone age humans had *some* impact on the environment, particularly when they started to develop agriculture & cleared forested areas for cultivation.