Briquettes eat into charcoal’s popularity in local households

Briquetting is a new technology that uses biomass waste to make a charcoal product in the form of solid blocks or pellets.
Briquettes are gaining popularity in Kenya because they provide a cleaner alternative to wood fuel, charcoal and kerosene.

Using briquettes for cooking, especially in peri-urban and informal settlements, is considered key in the fight against environmental degradation. When more people adopt briquettes less trees are felled for firewood and charcoal, thus conserving the environment.

Promoting the use of briquettes is one way of ensuring that Kenya increases its forest cover from the current 1.7 per cent to the globally recommended rate of 10 per cent. Besides addressing forest degradation, briquettes also burn for longer and produce less harmful smoke since they use recycled biomass.

iCoal Concepts Ltd is one of the companies that promote the use of briquettes through its SmartCharcoal product. The company began operations in 2012 in Dagoretti, Nairobi County.

Demand high

It produces three tonnes of briquettes daily and demand is high. Its main customers are expatriates, five star hotels, poultry and pig farmers and Kibera households. In Kibera, where iCoal sells most of the briquettes, women spoke highly of the product.

‘‘Briquettes are odourless and smokeless and therefore help to reduce indoor air pollution,’’ said Ms Achieng, a regular user of the product.

iCoal Concepts uses charcoal dust to make briquettes which are denser than charcoal and thus burn longer. A recent study by the Ministry of Energy shows that charcoal is the main fuel for 82 per cent of urban households in Kenya. Nairobi residents use 700 tonnes of charcoal per day. Up to 88 tonnes of charcoal dust is produced daily as a result of breakages during transportation and while handling the product.

The dust is often found at charcoal retail and wholesale stands. Despite briquettes’ popularity, production is low with most businesses operating in small, manual plants with limited capacity.

A field survey by the Global Village Energy Partnership has shown that micro businesses in briquettes face challenges in scaling up production as most make their products by hand.

Use of modern production techniques is vital if more people are to trade in, and have access to, efficient cooking fuels. Since June 2013, iCoal has been receiving technical support from the Kenya Climate Innovation Centre (KCIC) to scale up production, strengthen distribution and access financing.

Courtesy of KCIC, iCoal has been conducting product testing at the Kenya Industrial Research and Development Institute. iCoal is also part of the team pioneering crowd funding in Kenya with support from InfoDev; Crowdfunding Capital Advisors, and KCIC. Crowd funding is a new way of raising capital online. Access to finance is a major challenge for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Kenya.

As part of its mandate, KCIC provides access to finance services for clean-tech entrepreneurs, many of which are not able to obtain capital through conventional means such as bank loans and private equity.