Via AlertNet – A Thompson Reuters Foundation Service

Garbage-fed community cooker cuts wood use, energy costs

10 Apr 2012 15:45

By Isaiah Esipisu

KIBERA, Kenya (AlertNet) – At 9 am, boiled-maize vendor Janet Atieno leaves her house in Laini Saba village in Nairobi’s sprawling Kibera slum with a sack in one hand and a stick in the other. Her mission is to collect solid waste that she can exchange for cooking time at a community facility that makes use of garbage as fuel.

“For many years, I have used either charcoal or firewood to boil the maize. But the cost of these forms of energy has become unbearable,” said the mother of four, explaining why she decided to start picking up rubbish to redeem at the community cooker.

The cooker is based around a simple incinerator for dry solid waste, which burns at more than 800 degrees Celsius, with a very high combustion efficiency of up to 99 percent, according to its designers. The heat is channeled to nine cooking plates, used by local people to make food for commercial and domestic purposes, as well as for heating water.

“The main aim of constructing this facility was to help slum dwellers manage their solid wastes sustainably, and earn from it at the same time. But there are other advantages too,” said Janice Muthui, coordinator of the Community Cooker Foundation, a charitable trust set up by Planning Systems Services Ltd., the architectural practice that invented the cooker. “Whenever the cooker is on, it saves the equivalent of several tonnes of charcoal and firewood, which are the main sources of fuel in Kibera.”

With financial support from the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP), the company helped local artisans build the prototype cooker in 2008 in Kibera, one of Africa’s biggest slums, on behalf of a community-based organisation called Ushirika Wa Usafi Kibera (Fellowship for Cleanliness) Laini Saba Kibera.

The group, which has around 230 members, also provides commercial bathing services and toilets for slum dwellers, and solid waste management.

Nairobi-born Jim Archer, chairman of Planning Systems Services, told AlertNet he first started toying with the idea for the cooker back in the 1980s because he was disturbed by the growing mountains of rubbish he saw around him in Africa, where garbage collection is often poor.

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