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:
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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