Poo power: turning human waste into clean energy in Kenya's slums
Bio-centres turning human waste into electricity prove that feces is the ultimate source of renewable energy.
Biocentres in Kibera
have collected 60,000kg of poo, turning it into biogas.
They call them “flying toilets” – the
bags of human poo that are thrown out of the windows of the thousands of small
shacks that make up Nairobi’s slums.
The largest of Nairobi’s informal settlements
is Kibera, just three miles from the city centre. An estimated one million
people live there, and toilet facilities are scarce. The bare earth streets are
carved with gullies: equal parts open sewer and rubbish dump. The nearest
toilet for most people is a hole they have dug in a bare patch of ground at the
back of their shack.
But Josiah Omotto, a
managing trustee of the Umande trust,
has high ambitions: he wants Nairobi to become an open defecation-free city.
It’s a big challenge to set for yourself. “If open defecation was banned in
Nairobi today, every member of the informal settlements would have to queue for
two days to use the existing toilet facilities,” he says.
Umande and the
British charity Practical
Action have devised a solution that turns the mountains of
odorous human waste from a problem into an asset.
They are building bio-centres – toilet
facilities where human slurry is collected and put in a digester which collects
the methane emitted from poo as it breaks down. The methane is sold back to the
slum dwellers as biogas, used for cooking within the centres or to power hot
showers.
“Every individual creates 300g of human
waste each day, and 60% of Nairobi’s four million inhabitants live in its
informal settlements – that’s 2.4 million people,” says Omotto. “What we have
in Nairobi is 720,000 kg of shit. We want to turn it into biogas so that we can
tackle the energy crisis.”
Methane is a
greenhouse gas. If released into the atmosphere it is many times
worse for the environment than CO2. Steps are being taken
worldwide to reduce
emissions but since we humans are likely to carry on defecating
for many years to come, human poo could be considered the ultimate source of
renewable energy. It’s much better for the environment to burn the methane from
poo than from fossil fuels, after all.
Umande and its partners have built 57
biocentres in Nairobi, which have so far managed to collect at least 60,000 kg
of poo, according to Omotto.
Some biocentres also
have other facilities incorporated within the same block, including spaces for
recreation, social activities and small businesses.
The Stara biocentre in Kibera is run by
women who also manage an orphan school. At the bottom of the centre they offer
hot showers powered by biogas, and the first floor is let out as a legal advice
centre. The orphanage earns 45,000 Kenyan shillings a month from the biocentre,
which they use to fund their work with the children.
Aidah Ebrahim, project director for
Umande, says that between 350 and 1,000 people visit each of the toilet blocks
every day, paying three cents each to use the loo, and a few cents more for a
hot shower, if those are available.
But the project was not without its
challenges. Transporting heavy building materials across dirt streets riven
with gullies and piled high with detritus is not easy, and theft of building
materials is commonplace in Kibera. Umande held negotiations and the community
helped to transport the building materials, and keep them secure while the
facility was being built.
“Most of the projects are funded by
grants from donors, but since last year we have partnered with financial
institutions who are providing loans to pay for future sanitation projects,”
says Ebrahim. “This came after we definitively proved that the projects are
bankable, profitable and scalable.”
Umande is working
with engineers from Denmark and the Netherlands on converting the bioslurry
into fertiliser, and to see how we can recycle the water. They are also working
with a private company from Thailand to bag large quantities of gas for resale
to small businesses in the city. In the future, Umande would like to
incorporate solar panels to buildings and biodigesters to existing toilets so
that they do not have to build completely new facilities to create energy.
Practical Action is
replicating the project in other countries. In Vattavan, Sri Lanka, they
power their digester with animal waste, providing cooking gas and lighting in
rural areas. One of the project’s fans is Sakunthaladev Kathiravetpillai who
lives with her husband and four children. She used to spend each day collecting
fire wood for cooking but now she uses biogas and has more time to grow food,
or earn money for the family. She uses the dried out manure that is left after
the poo has decomposed as fertiliser on her vegetable garden.
This week, Umande
broke ground on the first of a series of toilet block biocentres in a slum in
Kisumu, near Lake Victoria. City officials reached out to the group after
seeing the success they’d had with the biocentres in Kibera. It seems the
renewable energy potential of poo is an idea worth spreading.
Story written by
Frederika
Whitehead
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