Tuesday 12 February 2013

Green Cooking - Part 2


We’ve established that producing and burning wood charcoal is unsustainable, terrible for the environment at a local, regional & global level; unhealthy, and increasingly expensive.  So what’s the alternative?

One alternative is to make charcoal briquettes from agricultural waste products.  By this I don’t mean burning up banana leaves, vegetable peel or animal waste, which should be composted to fertilise the next season’s crops. However, there are agricultural wastes which are of negligible compost value and so are often burnt in heaps just to dispose of them.  These include maize cobs, G-nut shells (aka peanuts!), sugar-cane bark, bean pods, excess dry grasses etc.  Wood-shavings from sawmills or carpentry shops also work well.  These can be made into charcoal briquettes which can then be used for cooking instead of wood-charcoal.

I can’t claim any originality for this project idea.  I read about it on the website for the 2011 “Ashden awards for sustainable development”, won by an industrial scale briquette maker in Kampala.  Briquette making can also be done on a low-tech domestic-scale, as proven with great success in Haiti, which has almost no forest left but many sugar-cane plantations.  Last Easter I visited a Christian Retreat Centre just outside Kampala where three women work full-time making charcoal briquettes for sale.  They let me watch and photograph the whole process.

Soon after our return to Uganda in October I completed putting together the equipment I needed and started a pilot charcoal project here in Kasese.  The women of Nyaksanga Baptist Church (in Acholi Quarter on the site of the Skills and Daycare projects) were excited about its potential and were keen to help experiment, along with their Pastor Alex and the indefatigable Isaiah, who kindly let us work in his compound and store everything in his house.   For three or four Saturdays in a row we gathered at Isaiah’s place and burnt stuff.  The women cooked tea on the very hot lid of the adapted oil-drum and sang and chatted while pounding burnt matter or binder ingredients.  These Saturdays reminded me of the joys of scout camps, but with more polite songs!

The process of turning agricultural waste into charcoal briquettes has four stages:  
1.       Gather dry waste and set fire to it in a big empty oil drum with some air holes.  Cover the drum with a lid & chimney so it gets less oxygen and burns to carbon instead of ash.

2.       Pound the burnt matter into a fine powder and mix with some water and a suitable binder, such as the red-clay soil from a termite mound.

3.       Make briquettes using a briquette maker.  We are using a hand meat-mincer adapted to have three pipes at the end instead of lots of small holes.

4.       Dry the briquettes in the sun for 2 days.
Our first attempts were difficult.  We broke the thread of our mincer trying to grind particles of carbonised maize-cob that were too big and our initial briquettes  were very difficult to ignite and didn’t burn well because we’d used too much termite-soil to bind them.  Persistence pays however, and we soon learnt how long to burn the waste for in the barrel, how fine to pound it and where to get the stickiest termite soil from.  A good innovation came from our ever wise and helpful BMS colleague Alex Vickers who suggested mixing in pounded eucalyptus leaves at the binding stage.  Eucalyptus leaves reduce the amount of soil needed for binding and the oil within them burns really well.  They also add a pleasant aroma when burning the briquettes which is much nicer (and healthier) than the choking fumes of wood charcoal!  As western Uganda is full of eucalyptus plantations which use the timber for poles and discard the leaves, they can be found easily here. 

Something else we’ve found in abundance around Acholi Quarter is sugar-cane waste.  It is estimated that 1 hectare of sugar-cane produces 10 tons of waste per year.  Behind Acholi Quarter sugar cane thrives along the banks of the Nyamwamba river and is a major source of calories (and probably dental problems…) in the local diet.  The bit you eat however is surrounded in layers and layers of leafy bark which are usually stripped off and discarded.  In half an hour one Saturday we were able to collect four massive maize sacks full of this waste which we turned into almost 10kg of charcoal briquettes.   We spent another Saturday morning with four siguris (metal stoves) and four pans of water doing an experiment on all the different types of briquettes we’ve made (maize cobs, bean-pods, sugar-cane bark and wood-shavings plus different combinations of binder) to see which lit best, boilt a pan of water most quickly and burnt hot for longest.  The winner is sugar-cane bark mixed with half eucalyptus and half termite-soil.  In a head to head with wood-charcoal it takes slightly longer to boil water but stays hot for longer and is almost smokeless.  When burning our briquettes in a clay “Ugastove” (an improved efficiency stove produced here in Uganda) rather than a metal siguri, the results were even better.  There was one final test however, of far greater cultural importance than boiling pans of water, and this was to cook Ubundu (local millet bread) entirely on home-made briquettes.  Once this had been achieved the women of Nyakasanga B.C were ululating in delight as only Ugandan women can.  They had made their own fuel out of entirely free ingredients and could use it cook the dish that every Bakhongo man wants to eat when he comes home at night!

The women of Nyakasanga Baptist Church are now supplying charcoal briquettes for the skills/Daycare project in Acholi Quarter which has, I have to confess, burnt hundreds of bundles of firewood in the past year whilst cooking maize porridge and lunch for our trainees and toddlers.  This is good news for Acholi Quarter, with two BMS funded projects mutually supporting each other, but the challenge is to move up in scale if we want to have a meaningful environmental impact.  A perfect opportunity presented itself in January with the Kasese District Baptist Association’s Women’s Conference.  Women from most of the district’s 35 churches would be gathered together in one place with their transport, food and accommodation already arranged (well, mostly).  We managed to book the whole of the Friday for a charcoal seminar. 

The women of Nyakasanga B.C don’t often attend such events because they can’t afford the £2.50 each for the transport.  In the social hierarchies of Bakhongo women, the women of Acholi Quarter seem to be fairly near the bottom. This year however, four of them went and had the opportunity to teach over one hundred of their sisters.  I kicked off the session explaining the purpose and benefits of the project using a big flipchart hanging from a tree.  We started with scripture using Psalm 24.1, Gen 1.26 & 28, Lev 25.23 and a more detailed look at Psalm 104.10-24, to look at the earth as God’s creation, mankind’s responsibilities towards it, and the fragile interdependence of all created things.  Then we moved onto the environmental importance of trees with some simple diagrams showing how trees are essential for rainfall, for ground-water storage and for preventing landslides and soil erosion – problems which are all too familiar to the mountain-dwelling Bakhongo.  Then we moved onto discussing the health impacts and economic benefits of alternative fuels.  Having suitably warmed up their audience to the benefits and importance of this project I then handed over to the women of Nyakasanga Baptist Church who ran a whole teaching and practical demonstration session.  Masika Sadress is a primary school teacher and proved adept at handling her class of over a hundred women, especially as they all crowded round trying to see what was happening.  She soon had one group of women pounding eucalyptus leaves and another pounding the carbonised matter while she responded to a hundred different questions and threw out her own questions to check that everyone was following.  It was great to see the women of Acholi Quarter taking centre stage, and owning it.  Although it was a Baptist Women’s Conference, they were also men there and members of local churches of different denominations, who were also excited about the potential for making their own fuel and were taking lots of notes so they can go and teach their own churches.

Although the equipment for this project can be bought and made locally at a relatively low cost (about £75 per set) this is still far beyond the means of many of the smaller rural churches who could be the ones to benefit the most from it.  However, we don’t intend to drive round the district handing out adapted oil-drums and meat-mincers to all and sundry, so we produced an application form in English and Lukhongo, and a step-by-step training booklet with colour-photos also in English and Lukhongo (thanks to the patient translation work of Pr Alex and Isaiah).  The plan is that the women will take the forms back to their churches, see what agricultural wastes they have which they could use, see where they could work & store their materials, talk to their Pastors and then agree to raise a contribution towards the costs of starting the projects as a church.  Once all the forms are in the Development Committee will meet in March and review them, discuss which churches would be most appropriate and apply to BMS’ Environmental Challenge Fund for the remaining money needed.  Hopefully we can then have groups of women at churches all over the District making their own charcoal, saving/earning money from it and protecting their own environment.

Prayer Requests:

1.       Give thanks to the clever people at MIT D-Lab and other such places who come with ideas like this, and publicise them freely.

2.       Give thanks for the hardwork and persistence of those at Nyakasanga B.C. who’ve made this pilot project a success, and pray that they will benefit as they start to sell their own charcoal.

3.       Pray that the enthusiasm generated at the conference will turn into action so that this project can take off across the District.

4.       Pray that we can all re-examine our own habits and routines which are environmentally destructive and/or unhealthy and have the courage to try and change them.

References:
http://www.ashden.org/winners/KJS09                                 


 
Atkinson, D. (R. Rev). 2008. Renewing the Face of the Earth, a theological and pastoral response to climate change, Norwich: Canterbury Press.
Bookless, D. 2008. Planetwise, Dare to Care for God’s World, Nottingham:  Inter-Varsity Press.
Maathai, W. 2009. The Challenge for Africa. London: Arrow Books.

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