Banana briquettes
Making cooking briquettes from banana waste is a promising idea for development. I guess it works for plantain crops too. However, I don’t see why the focus should just be on Africa. Banana-fuel could be useful across Southern and South-Eastern Asia, Latin American and some Pacific islands too. There could even be a business in this. Labour and sawdust would be easy to come by, as would sunlight for drying the briquettes. The problem, I imagine, would be collecting the banana waste. Unlike sawdust, banana skins aren’t found in one place, but scattered throughout a million waste bins. The options for collecting this input look poor:
- Hiring scavengers may be one, basic, reclaimation option, but I think the cost may rule that out.
- You could offer an incentive for customers to return their banana skins, and pay by weight. In many ways, this is like outsourcing the scavenger option, and doesn’t remove the inefficiency.
- Grow your own bananas. Then you need some way to make money from the fruit. Drying and chipping may be the best option, or grinding into banana flour.
Option 3 makes me think that banana-chipping outfits probably already exist in some places. So perhaps there is a stock of banana skin waste…. a quick online search turns up Narosa Farms.
