Philippines goes for solar bulbs record

The Philippines is on its way to set a Guinness world record as civic groups, led by the Rotary Club District 3830 and the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), installed more than 11,000 solar bulbs in 30 communities in Metro Manila in one day.

The goal was to light 10,000 homes in low-income communities in Metro Manila Wednesday.

Shelly Lazaro, president of Rotary Club of Makati San Lorenzo and the overall project manager, said the groups were able to install 11,300 solar bulb devices.

The number has to be independently audited by Guinness Book of Records representatives who were on hand during the daylong event.

“We are aiming for the largest grassroots green-lighting program in the world,” Lazaro said.

She said this was done in Brazil a few years back with 3,000 solar bulbs installed in a day.

“For the Rotary, the record is just the icing on the cake. Our aim is community service,” she said.

While solar bulb technology is simple and inexpensive, it has a huge impact on the lives of those who live in slum communities.

Water, bleach

The device calls for an empty 1.5-liter plastic soda bottle which is filled with a liter of water and a proportionate amount of bleach.

The plastic bottle is fitted in a metal sheet, placed in a hole on the roof, so that it can take in light during the day.

The gadget can light a darkened room like a 60-watt bulb does. It can last up to five years before the water has to be changed.

Lazaro recalled that when her group introduced the device at a barangay in San Juan City, a woman cried upon seeing the solar bulb work.

The woman said that with enough light in the room, her children no longer had to go out in the streets to read.

Huge impact

“It’s a very simple technology with a huge impact,” Lazaro said.

The inexpensive and ecofriendly device works not only for darkened rooms in slum areas but also for small grocery stores, public market stalls and even warehouses that need lighting.

Using the solar bulb also reduces the fire hazard from the use of lighted candles and gas lamps.

All 77 clubs under Rotary District 3830 were involved in the project. They provided the materials while the AFP provided the manpower and vehicles.

The project also involved My Shelter Foundation which provided the technology, as well as One Meralco Foundation and local government units.

My Shelter Foundation is led by Illac Diaz, who was part of the group of students of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which came up with the device.

Simultaneous

The solar bulbs were installed simultaneously yesterday in tne cities of Caloocan, Las Piñas, Makati, Malabon, Mandaluyong, Manila, Marikina, Muntinlupa, Navotas, Parañaque, Pasay, San Juan, Taguig, Valenzuela and Quezon City.

“It is bayanihan spirit at its best,” said Lt. Col. Samuel Sagun, head of the AFP Civil Relations Service’s 7th Civil Relations Group.

Sagun said the group’s target was to bring the technology to far-flung communities which soldiers can reach.

Their aim next year is to install 107,000 solar bulbs nationwide when Rotary Global marks its 107th anniversary in February, according to Lazaro. “Ultimately my goal is to bring this global,” she said.

Climate change summit

What began as a small-scale effort in a Manila slum early this year has quickly spread throughout the Philippines and even to impoverished communities in Colombia, India and Vanuatu.

It has also earned Diaz accolades from the United Nations, which will bring him to its climate change summit in South Africa next week to show world leaders how “solar light bottles” are helping to tackle global warming.

“This has blown us away,” Diaz told Agence France Presse of the international reaction to the project that is in part due to a powerful YouTube clip and smart use of social media sites such as Facebook.

“Our original concept was just a Philippine project. We didn’t think it was going to be possible to do it on this scale,” he said.

Diaz said another 100,000 would be installed in Cebu province in December, putting the project on track to meet or exceed its goals of helping one million people over 12 months.

“This is a grass-roots revolution, a people-powered revolution, using simple and low-cost technologies,” he said.

Opposite of Gore’s model

Diaz described the bottle concept as the opposite of Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth model, which he said required poor countries to import or develop clean energy technologies such as windmills and solar panels.

“These are expensive and not a lot of people… actually benefit from them,” he said.

“So instead of going high-tech, high-specialty, why not go with something that could be done by hand and cheaply, but could be replicated thousands or millions of times. You can affect more people, save more carbon,” he said.

Diaz said each solar light bottle each year saved 17 kilograms of carbon dioxide, one of the gases that causes global warming, compared with a household using an electric light bulb.

“If you multiply that by a million bottles, that will save more carbon than one huge windmill which costs more to run.”

Savings

In the San Pedro slum community on the outskirts of Manila where the project started, residents think not about the climate but of the extra light they enjoy during the day without having to use an expensive electric bulb.

Many of the slum houses are dark even during the brightest days, with few windows in the concrete or corrugated iron walls to let the daylight in.

Monico Albao, 46, has five solar bottles installed into the corrugated roof of his tiny home that he shares with his 22-year-old daughter, her bus conductor husband and a two-month-old grandson.

“My electricity costs have halved. The money we save, we spend on food and clothes for my grandson,” said Albao. With a report from AFP