This startup’s portable camping stoves can also charge devices — here’s how the company is using its technology to bring clean energy to remote communities around the world
BioLite, a techy outdoors brand, is using its Kickstarter-famous gear to address the world's energy poverty.
- Outdoors startup BioLite makes innovative camping gear like smokeless fire pits and stove tops that use the energy generated to charge devices.
- The company used the same technology to develop safe, smokeless stoves for use by remote communities around the world living in energy poverty – meaning without easy access to electricity.
- Fast forward many nights, weekends, and prototypes later, and the two accomplished something revolutionary in 2006: a portable biomass stove that leveraged thermoelectrics to create a smokeless fire and charge personal devices.
- All in all, BioLite makes some of the best outdoors gear that money can buy, and it represents a unique opportunity for two distinct markets – outdoor enthusiasts seeking cleaner power, and developing-world families living in energy poverty – to have a positive, cohesive relationship with one another.
- Simultaneously, it could help someone halfway across the world free up hours of time every day, something that – in a developing landscape – can be legitimately life-changing.