Alice Min Soo Chun is a girl pushed by a ardour for doing good and serving to save the planet with modern merchandise she invented powered with sustainable lighting know-how.
Chun is a former college professor who taught structure and supplies know-how at MIT, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale. She labored along with her college students to construct and check prototypes for the perfect outcomes relating to supplies’ performance, look, and sturdiness. The consequence was the founding of Solight Design and the invention of the SolarPuff Light and associated merchandise.
As the outdated saying goes: Necessity is the mom of invention. This mom took that adage to coronary heart as she struggled along with her younger son’s bronchial asthma.
Her son’s state of affairs, plus seeing a homeless mom and her household getting gentle and warmth from a kerosene fireplace on the finish of a metropolis alleyway, impressed her to develop a packable, inflatable, and floatable photo voltaic lantern to scale back breathable air pollution.
In the center of the alley was a jug filled with kerosene with an enormous, thick rope popping out of the container that they had lit with fireplace. Alice knew she needed to do one thing as she thought in regards to the kids respiratory the extraordinarily dangerous chemical substances and toxins within the smoke every day.
“Solight is way more than being about an object or product. It is about creating change,” stated Chun.
Those experiences made her notice that well being, the atmosphere, and poverty are linked inextricably in a profound means. She thought of how one easy resolution like Solight might “tackle all three.”
Alice Chun stepped out of her position as a college professor to deal with growing modern moveable photo voltaic vitality know-how to learn the world’s needy and enhance their high quality of life.
Entrepreneurial Challenges
As a fledgling feminine entrepreneur and product developer, Chun confronted extra obstacles in beginning her enterprise than she will recount. Her ardour for doing good and serving to these troubled by pure disasters saved her engaged on her targets.
“For anyone that wants to become an entrepreneur, I think the first thing that you have to do is really think about how you can help people and how you can solve problems that will make life better,” supplied Chun.
Inventors and entrepreneurs should actually love what they’re doing as a result of it’s so onerous, she continued. It is so aggressive and includes an extremely great quantity of labor.
“You really have to believe in what you are doing. Otherwise, you are just going to give up,” Chun stated.
Solar Solutions To Fight Pollution
Seeing so many children with bronchial asthma, which is loads greater proportion right now than when she was a child, Chun researched the situation and realized that the air pollution in city settings comes from vitality consumption and development, creating 75% of the pollution within the air.
She realized that it’s too early in our human gene pool to vary susceptibility quickly. So, Chun started to deal with photo voltaic vitality as a method to handle the environmental situation.
The inventor began stitching photo voltaic panels to various kinds of materials as a result of technological improvements produced lighter and stronger supplies. She was growing this idea when the Haiti earthquake occurred in 2010.
Natural disasters occurring extra ceaselessly, comparable to flooding from Hurricane Katrina, the tsunami strike in Japan, after which the Haiti earthquake, fed her need to discover a resolution to the darkness attributable to the dearth of electrical energy. Those occasions prompted Chun to do one thing to assist.
More lately, Solight partnered with the non-profit group Florida Rising to ship Solights to victims within the wake of Hurricane Ian, which devastated the Sunshine State after making landfall on Sept. 28.
Never-Ending Testing Grounds
Chun and her Solight backers have been actively concerned in quite a few world disasters. Her humanitarian efforts proceed with photo voltaic lighting for refugees trapped within the midst of the Russian incursion and conflict in Ukraine. Those world occasions embrace disasters in Senegal, Mozambique, Puerto Rico, Senegal, and 16 different places.
“I turned my studio at Columbia University into an innovation studio to assist Haiti. That is once we realized that Haiti was a microcosm of what was occurring globally in areas the place there isn’t any electrical energy.
“With 2.6 billion people in the world living without access to electricity, they use kerosene to light their world at night, which is a deadly toxic fuel,” Chun instructed TechNewsWorld.
Burning kerosene causes two million childhood deaths yearly from bronchial asthma, respiratory points, and inhaling poisonous smoke. In Haiti, the place there may be excessive poverty, and other people stay on $3 a day, they spend as much as 30% of their revenue on kerosene, she defined.
“So that was the moment I started to become a social entrepreneur. They could save money spent buying kerosene for lighting and instead buy their children food and pay for other needs,” she stated.
Chun researched each photo voltaic gentle product in the marketplace. They have been all large, cumbersome, heavy, and ugly. So, she tapped into her personal childhood experiences doing origami. That contributed to her inventing the photo voltaic backpack. She spent 5 years discipline testing it on the central plateau in Haiti with girls farmers.
Kickstarter Success
That was the start of Chun’s journey with solar energy and the event of her Solight product. Thanks to a Kickstarter program in 2015, she raised half 1,000,000 {dollars} in 30 days.
At that point, the Nepal earthquake occurred, and as a part of her marketing campaign, she amplified the funding objective to incorporate a buy-one-give-one-to-Nepal that was an incredible success in serving to victims there.
“We had volunteers that were on their way to Nepal. We lit up little villages on the hillside with light. It was something that we continue to do even now. We have sent light to Ukraine refugees, and we have a volunteer in Peru,” she supplied.
The litany of sustainable lighting is spectacular, together with a church group in Puerto Rico, the place Chun’s firm supplied lighting help throughout and after Hurricane Maria within the type of lighting kits to 1000’s of individuals with out electrical energy.
“There are so many different uses for Solight. Our philosophy is that just doing one small thing can make a huge impact if we all work together to create change,” supplied Chun.
Solar Lantern
Solight is a photo voltaic rechargeable cellular LED gentle supply powered by modern photo voltaic know-how. The lighting designs resemble light-weight, foldable origami lanterns that mimic the Japanese artwork kind and are self-inflating. Depending on the product, photo voltaic vitality will be saved for longer-term use with an included solar-rechargeable energy pack.
An ordinary rechargeable photo voltaic lantern takes eight hours of daylight to final by means of eight dead nights. The brightness output varies with the product and ranges from 40 to 600 lumens. The high-tech waterproof material is engineered for excessive climate and float, they usually fold flat and simply journey wherever.
Part of Chun’s ardour for the Solight idea helps to heal the atmosphere. According to Chun, utilizing the light-weight and cost-efficient Solight know-how for one hour a day as an alternative of tapping into {the electrical} grid to run a lightweight bulb can save 90 kilos of carbon emissions a 12 months.
More R & D
Chun’s present product line offers an answer for reasonably priced and sustainable off-grid lighting options for people. But she just isn’t stopping there, as new merchandise are within the analysis and improvement section.
In the works are prototypes that take care of making use of the Solight know-how to purposes comparable to telephone charging capabilities.
The pandemic gave rise to a different invention, clear facial masks. Surgical face masks made from polypropylene, a plastic that leaches toxins into landfills and the ocean, are used globally. Billions of those masks get thrown away every year.
“This is like a ticking time bomb ecologically for the planet. We have already seen what is happening as a detriment to the planet because of all the waste of these polypropylene masks,” Chun warned.
Her resolution is a clear, non-toxic silicone face masks with filters.
Alice Chun fashions a prototype of a biodegradable clear face masks with built-in filters she is growing.
The objective isn’t just to remove the poisonous waste piling up from pandemic-era face masks. She additionally desires to rid the harm that face coverings trigger kids of their adolescence and assist folks with listening to loss who can now not learn lips to speak.
“Because we were all wearing masks during the pandemic, there was a delay in language development in children because they could not see facial expressions, and they could not read lips. They had a harder time learning language. So, the idea of facial transparency is something to help the future,” noticed Chun.
She added that Silicone is recyclable. It has no BPA and is reusable, and the filters are cellulose biodegradable with 95% filtration efficacy.
Credit: The photos on this story are courtesy of Solight Design.