Alice Min Soo Chun, CEO of Solight Design Credit: Alice Min Soo Chun
Welcome to Small Change — the place to learn the true story behind news soundbites.
Today, I’m excited to be speaking with Alice Min Soo Chun, co-founder and CEO of Solight Design.
Alice was a professor of Architecture and Material Technology at Columbia University as well as Parsons, School of Design in New York city.
Now, Alice devotes her time to inventing sustainable, environmentally friendly products that address global crises like the dearth of reliable renewable energy to power lights at night.
Alice grew up in Seoul, Korea as well as upstate New York where her mother, an interior designer and painter, taught her to make origami and sew her own clothes.
Alice’s father, an architect, designed the family’s home and built furniture for their living room.
Early life lessons from her parents informed the social entrepreneur and activist’s architectural practice as well as the solar lanterns she now designs. Her son’s asthma diagnosis set Alice on a path to end the use of fossil fuels and informed the choice of materials used to construct her aesthetically pleasing lights.
Currently, 1.6 billion people around the world don’t have access to electricity. Many of those folks burn kerosene to light up the dark. But that creates carcinogens and fine particulate matter that can lead to ischemic heart disease, stroke, lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and lower respiratory infections.
World Health Organization (WHO) studies have long proved that replacing kerosene lamps with solar lighting not only improves health, but reduces environmental impacts by eliminating black carbon and carbon dioxide emissions that warm the planet.
SolarPuff, Alice’s first lantern, has brought sustainable solar energy to over one million people living in underserved areas. These solar lanterns also help North Americans live more sustainably because replacing just one light bulb with a solar light saves 90 pounds/41 kilograms of carbon emissions a year.
MegaPuff is a variation on SolarPuff that lets folks to charge their phones. The origami-inspired cube with a Velcro strap on top is assembled by twisting the lantern while pulling the top and bottom apart until the light pops into its cube shape.
MegaPuff can be charged using the enclose USB cord or by setting it in direct sunlight for ten hours. A fully charged battery provides ten hours of light.
MegaPuff has light intensity and colour options and can be set to ‘flash’ indicating distress Credit: Solight
QWNN unfolds into a beautiful lotus flower-shaped lantern. After ten hours of solar charging, it provides up to 40 hours of light and can be used to recharge cell phones.
QWNN has six light modes including flashing Credit: Solight
Both lanterns have a variety of settings that lets folks choose light intensity and colour and both have a flashing light option.
Made from water-resistant, high-tech, recyclable, biodegradable fabric, the lanterns are waterproof and float.
Alice’s lanterns have become an essential source of light for people living in war zones. They’re being included in emergency kits by folks living in areas prone to wildfires, floods, hurricanes or earthquakes. These lanterns have even been found to reduce crime – including rapes and sexual assaults — after natural disasters, in refugee camps and for folks who have to travel by foot in the dark.
Alice created the Give a Light program for folks to donate lights to areas of the world in need of illumination and hope including Ukraine, Haiti and New Orleans.
Alice also included Navajo Strong a nonprofit that serves the Navajo reservation in the Give a Light program.
The Navajo reserve is the largest reservation in the United States (US) and one of the poorest regions in the country. The reserve accounts for 75 per cent of the households without electricity in the US.
Travelers are also taking Alice’s compact lanterns to countries they visit to distribute to local residents so they have a reliable source of light and means of charging their cell phones.
Listen to my conversation with Alice to find out more about this amazing inventor, social and environmental activist who has been awarded the US Patent Award for Humanity; featured in Hillary and Chelsea Clinton’s 2019 book, The Book of Gutsy Women and in the docuseries, GUTSY; and who in 2022 was honoured as a Fast Company ‘World Changing Idea’ and a Marie Claire PowerTrip Honoree for Most Influential Woman.
Thanks to everyone who read today’s article and listened to my podcast. With your continued support, a little Nicoll can make a lot of change.
Music: Real Estate by UNIVERSFIELD is licensed under a Attribution 4.0 International License. freemusicarchive.org.
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Alice Min Soo Chun illuminates hope worldwide