In Kenya, wood is no longer necessarily the basic material for charcoal. Turning human excrement into charcoal is an ingenious project that is both economical and ecological.
Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed. This is a famous quote from Antoine Lavoisier on the conservation of mass during the change of state of matter. This thought is still relevant today and makes sense if human excrement is turned into combustible charcoal. In Kenya, the company Sanivation, located about 100 km from Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, specialises in recycling waste (excrement) into charcoal that can be used for cooking and heating.
An environmentally friendly energy source
In fact, in Kenya, charcoal is the main means of cooking food. But its production is a vector of deforestation. Hence the alternative of making charcoal from human excrement. An environmentally friendly source of energy is thus born and is the pride of the local population
“This product has actually caught on in the market much faster than we thought. We are currently selling more than 120 tonnes and we can’t even keep up with market demand. The use of this fuel is very important for the environment as for every tonne used, we save 33 trees,” Paul Manda, Plant Manager at Sanivation, told Africanews.
A fairly simple manufacturing process
The ecological charcoal produced by Sanivation not only meets the needs of the population for cooking food but also addresses a health problem. Indeed, in this region of Nakuru, northwest of Nairobi, only 27% of homes are connected to a sewage system. As a result, latrines are dumped in the open overnight. This is already a public health problem. For example, to make the charcoal balls from dung, the startup set up a fairly simple production process.
First, a waste collection programme was set up with the installation of numerous dry toilets and a regular truck tour. The excrement collected by the tanker trucks is then taken to the treatment plant. There it is dried for two to three weeks in a greenhouse, where the high temperatures remove up to 70% of the moisture from the material. After drying, the product is carbonised at a temperature of 700 degrees Celsius in order to destroy the germs and the smell. The resulting product is then mixed with grains of sand that have also been carbonised. The whole is finally agglomerated to create small balls that are easy to burn.
In time, the company thought of making sawdust briquettes, again based on human excrement. The project, which was initiated years ago in Kenya, was put to the test before it was approved by the people. Today, they love it because it meets an economic (briquettes last longer) and health (they produce less smoke) problem. Through this initiative, the company intends to place itself as the alternative to environmental preservation.
