Replacing charcoal with waste biomass pellets for cooking, in Zambia
Three billion people in the developing world use open fires or wood charcoal for cooking. Cooking over open fire produces black soot and toxic gases, leading to the premature death of 1.8 million persons yearly, mainly women and children. It is also estimated that particulates from open fires is responsible for 18 per cent of the greenhouse effect. Many low-income families spend a substantial part of their household income on wood or charcoal for cooking. Others spend a lot of time collecting wood far away from home.
These are some of the challenges that Millions of Stoves Sweden AB (www.vaggatillvagga.se) together with Zambian partner EnviroCo have set out to tackle. We will introduce to the market a unique cooking-system using a virtually free, abundant and largely untapped source of energy for cooking: waste biomass such as straw, stems, husks, shells or pits and forestry waste such as sawdust, made into pellets. Together with our "micro-gasifying" stove we will sell pellets below market price of the equivalent in firewood or charcoal, leading to substantial household savings as well as major environmental benefits. The stoves will be lent to the households as long as they purchase our fuel.
The driver in our business model is that most urban and peri-urban people already spend up to €150 per year on charcoal, and that we can produce pellets from sawdust at a much lower cost.
We are aware that many stove programmes in the past have failed and we think this is often because the threshold of entry is too high (the cost of the stove) or the model is not sustainable (relying on subsidies for stoves, which eventually will run out) and perhaps most importantly: not addressing the fuel issue. Think about it: Africa's forests are being turned into charcoal for cooking, sold at high costs to end users (it is a tough job to make charcoal). Switching to liquid, fossil fuels such as kerosene for cooking or electricity is impossible given the scale and urgency of the problem. The most obvious solutions that we see is to densify (pelletise) biomass otherwise not used, which is plentiful. Micro-gasifying stoves are clean and very efficient.
We are currently in the pilot phase: we have surveyed 190 households, have produced 35 stoves locally in the city of Kitwe as well as sawdust pellets with our own equipment. Preliminary results are encouraging. For example, the picture below shows one of the workshop staff cooking local dish "Nshima" for lunch on our stove using our pellets - something they've been doing spontaneously now for a month. Why? Because charcoal is really expensive...
Our next step will be a demonstration project for 500 households, where people will have to buy pellets. In other words, we will test our business model, adjust it if necessary and then start to scale up.
The project is supported by Sida:s small grant under the Innovation Against Poverty program as well as by Copperbelt Energy Corporation Plc.
Here are some videos showing the progress:
Making stoves: http://vimeo.com/32421076
Making first pellets: http://vimeo.com/32616928
Stove demo Zamtan: http://vimeo.com/32616960