Rosemary and Njeri are two women from the slum of Kibera who are trying out an experiment to make fuel briqettes out of forest wastes from the  Ngong Road forest.

To learn all about the briquettes making process, they visited Kitengela Glass – a glass recycling plant just outside of Nairobi and very near the wilderness of Nairobi National Park. A number of alternative energy innovations are being tried at Kitengela including biogas.

Art is made at Kitegela  from all maner of recycled materials – this is a beer can bull

Rosemary and Njeri had a first hand lesson on how to make briquettes from the staff there, and were able to experiment with leaves and seeds collected from Ngong Road Forest.

Seeds and leaves usually go to waste, Rosemary and Njeri intend to convert these into eco-energy briquettes. The seeds collected are from the common and otherwise rather useless peppery smelling tree, the croton. These seeds are said to be about 30% oil and are being pressed elsewere to produce biodiesel!   Eucalyptus leaves are also everywhere as 20% of the forest is eucalyptus. The leaves burn very easily

Lesson 1. Everything has to be soaked and then mashed.

At Kitengela it is done in a traditional pestle and mortar. Soaked croton seeds did break up quite readily but the eucalyptus leaves are very resistant.

It looks like hard work but is actually quite easy as the materials have all been soaking for a week.

Lesson 2. The mush is pushed into a tube and then pressed to extract as much water as possible.

It takes at least three people at this stage- one to press the lever, one to hold the briquettes, and one to hold the press down!

Lesson 3. The briquettes have to be removed carefully and laid out to dry.

Our briquettes made of forest waste looked very promising. They are now drying and we will try them out in a few days.

Findings

1. Croton will work
2. Eucalyptus leaves need to be mashed. Soaking and pounding do not work
3. To make the mush stick together we needed about 50% paper mixture. Next we’d like to try fresh cowdung
4. It’s labour intensive – this outfit took 4 people to operate one briquette press and produced 10 briquettes every 10 minutes

The big question

Everything seems to work but before we produce tons of briquettes we need the answer to one important question. Will the community want to use briquettes instead of charcoal and wood?

To test this Rosemary and Njeri went home with briquettes made before and we are anxiously waiting for thier report  – would they be willing to exchange fuel wood for briquettes?