How to Clean Up The Slums -- Cook on Garbage
Date: 31-Aug-07
Country: KENYA
Author: Barry Moody
The city government does not recognise the "informal
settlements" where more than 60 percent of the population live,
so no services are provided and no garbage collected.
The result is frighteningly insanitary conditions.
Rubbish, "flying toilets" -- excrement in plastic bags --
and even aborted foetuses pile up in dumps along the muddy
tracks or find their way into the rivers, where children play
along the banks.
Garbage pollutes the air and seeps into ground water, or is
picked over by pigs and other farm animals, its toxins entering
the food chain and causing intestinal diseases.
Now a "community cooker" project in Africa's biggest slum,
Kibera, offers a way not only of getting rid of garbage, but of
creating work for unemployed youths, and providing hot water and
cooking facilities.
The people developing the project, a Nairobi architectural
practice, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and a
Kenyan non-governmental organisation, hope it can be a prototype
for cookers all over Africa.
The cooker, dreamed up by Kenyan architect Jim Archer, has
taken eight years to develop and is still overcoming design
problems.
"My thinking was how do we get rid of the rubbish and ...
how can we induce people to pick it up. Then I thought, well if
we can convert it to heat on which people can cook..."
Industrial incinerators from Europe would cost US$50 million.
"This was way out of the realms of reality ... and it wouldn't
give anything back," Archer said.
He set out to design and find financing for a simple, labour
intensive device with a minimum of moving parts that would be
easy to repair and require no imported technology.
Archer consulted engineering companies in Britain.
"They just couldn't understand simplicity. They could
computer control it. They could mechanically handle the rubbish.
But we want this to be labour intensive because there are so
many people with no jobs."
FIREBOX FRANCIS
Then Archer found brass foundry worker Francis Gwehonah,
nicknamed "Firebox" because of his remarkable self-taught skill
at furnace building.
"It is a talent in me. I haven't gone through any kind of
training," says Gwehonah.
First attempts to burn the rubbish produced choking smoke
and soot that brought complaints from Kibera residents that the
cooker caused more pollution than it eliminated.
By trial and error Gwehonah found that if he superheated a
steel plate in the cooker he could ignite discarded sump oil,
another pollutant.
By vaporising droplets of water to split off the oxygen and
mixing it with the burning oil, he has pushed up the temperature
to more than 600 degrees centigrade and is working to get it
even higher to destroy all the toxins in the smoke.
The scheme, run by a community group in Kibera's Laini Saba
area, where 50,000 people live, has more benefits than burning
garbage.
Local youth workers who go door to door collecting rubbish
-- for which they are paid a small fee by slum dwellers -- can
exchange it for cooking time or hot washing water.
John Githinji, from the 40-strong youth group that collects
the rubbish, stoked the furnace with sweat pouring from his
face. "People throw rubbish on the ground and it causes
sickness," he grunted through the smoke.
Water will also be boiled for drinking and eventually the
cooker will be used for baking bread and cakes to sell.
"The trash has started to help us a bit after the cooker
came. There are less diseases like diarrhoea and the environment
has improved. ... I think burning the rubbish will bring good
health to this community," said Patricia Ndunge as she fried
onions on the cooker.
About 60 percent of the slum rubbish can be burned if the
temperature is high enough. Much of the rest can be sold to
recycling companies.
The project, funded by Archer and h
