KENYA
Energy costs have created a vicious cycle in Kenya’s tea production. High oil prices pushed factories to substitute firewood boilers for oil furnaces. That creates far-reaching local impacts: Trees are harvested early in their growth for fast cash. They are often not replaced by new plants. That adds to the deforestation that seems unstoppable in many regions of Asia. A firewood boiler in a Kenyan tea factory, such as that at Makomboki consumes six trees per hour of operation: 15,000 a year. Makomboki has two boilers, requiring up to 30,000 trees annually.
Makomboki has demonstrated the immediate and immense payoff from switching to briquettes made from biomass waste. It has entirely eliminated the use of timber. The briquettes are made from waste material collected from farms and sawmills: macadamia, cashew and rice husks, straw, sawdust, etc. Mills often burn the sawdust just to get rid of it. Makomboki’s network makes it easy to collect the biomass. It is one of Kenya’s 66 factories and serves 5,600 smallholder farmers. It has 132 leaf collection centers.
The quantified operating savings are impressive. Its energy expenses fell from $542,000 to $295,000. That does not take into account the investment cost of the boilers. Makomboki benefited here from a donation by the Living Earth Foundation.
This small example is easy to replicate. It’s local, small in scale, does not require the education and mobilization many other areas of sustainable development require. It provides hard cash savings and also provides many environmental benefits, not one at the neglect of the other. For instance, the sawdust in briquettes gets fully consumed with no particulates, heavy smoke, and air contamination. Such micro gains give smaller farms a chance of surviving the economic, climate and productivity challenges that darken their days.
Policy change is far more complex and out of their control or even in opposition to their interests. This includes taxation, subsidies, and incentives. Funding the future will determine if initiatives like Makomboki are the blueprint for the new mainstream of farming practice or a one-off.