Burnt Sugar supports solar stoves in Africa

As you might have noticed in our review, we SmartPlaneteers are quite big fans of Burnt Sugar's fudge. Mainly because of the flavour, but also because the company really does make an effort to do good stuff in the world, too. It has just embarked on a project replacing open fires with solar stoves in East Africa.

Besides using Kenyan Fairtrade sugar in the actual fudge and donating books to sub-Saharan Africa through Book Aid, Burnt Sugar also works with CO2 Balance to offset the company's carbon emissions. Every year Burnt Sugar can choose a project to support through its offsetting fees and this year, it's solar-powered stoves in East Africa.

Although we here at SmartPlanet don't normally see offsetting as a solution, we think this particular project is interesting. The solar stoves work by reflecting the sunlight into the centre of the oven to generate heat to cook from and therefore don't need any other fuel. Very clever.

Burnt Sugar's Justine Cather told me earlier that the fudge company is particularly happy to support this project because of the "whole burnt thing" -- it helps eliminate the farmers' need to burn wood and thus helps stop deforestation.

Paul Chiplen from CO2 Balance adds that the project has many other benefits in addition to the actual carbon saving. It saves the users time and money in gathering wood or buying fuel to cook with, it results in less smoke and is safer in terms of the fire risks that open fires bring. It also helps the local economy by providing 'free fuel' as well as local employment and training, as the ovens are made locally. Get that sugar burning.

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