What if your kitchen waste could fuel your next meal? A Ghanaian ecopreneur is making this a reality by transforming discarded cassava peels into powerful cooking briquettes. Using easily accessible materials like drums and waste husks, coupled with his dream of a greener future, he is converting agricultural waste into an energy source. Hungry for change? Watch and learn how to do it yourself.
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00:00Ready to get the hands dirty.
00:09Hi today I'm going to show you how to make briquettes from cassava peels.
00:13Yes briquettes from cassava peels.
00:16This will turn into this.
00:29So over here as you can see in this bag I have lots of cassava peels.
00:35This is our main ingredient to make the briquette.
00:38To begin we need to set up the locally acquired drums and in this drum here you have to make
00:45holes underneath the drum.
00:48So these holes are supposed to help you to set up the fire from the bottom and then there
00:54will be an opening at the top where you load, you can call it the loading chamber.
01:04Once this setup is done we are going to use the corn husk and put them into these holes.
01:11Once we are done with that we are going to mount the drum on this setup.
01:19At this point we are ready to start loading into the chamber right here.
01:30You don't need the size of this drum to be able to do it yourself.
01:35You can use a very small drum size.
01:38All you need is to have the process right.
01:42So to help or to aid in combustion we need to create a hole in the middle and this hole
01:48is created by putting the stick right through the middle.
01:57At this point we are going to light it from the top and from the bottom.
02:02The reason why we are doing that is because we want to have a uniform burning and then
02:06have it burn inwards.
02:08So burning from the top and burning from the bottom.
02:11So at this point we are going to leave this to burn for about 30 minutes and whilst it's
02:17burning we are going to be mixing it up to have it uniformly burnt.
02:22So when the fire begins to burn flammably what it means is all the moisture is out of
02:28the waste and then you are almost close to the point where you have to cover and stop
02:34any sort of oxygen from entering the chamber.
02:38So at this point what we are doing is covering any form of outlet or inlet that will allow
02:44oxygen into the drum.
02:49So at this stage our carbonisation process is over.
02:56So this is our end product from the carbonisation process, the burnt char.
03:01We are now going to crush it and then get a smooth char which we can later mix with
03:06our binder to get our briquettes.
03:10So at this point we are making our binder which is made mainly of cassava.
03:14We are pouring our starch into our heated water to evenly get our binder which is our
03:23starch.
03:24At this stage we are mixing our char with our binder and mix it gradually until we get
03:28a uniform texture of the char and the binder.
03:33So after mixing our char with the binder and getting a uniform mixture we now mould
03:42our mixed char and binder into our briquettes and then at this stage we finally mould it
03:48into our desired shapes that we want as you can see.
04:04Being someone who is concerned about the environment and coming from a background where I had my
04:09grandmother sell charcoal and knowing the destruction it caused to the forest and the
04:14environment I mean I was very enthused to do something about climate change and I figured
04:22that I didn't need the biggest of investments to be able to start it and then I put together
04:28a team that was committed and shared the same values and the same dream of protecting
04:34the environment and doing something within our own capacity and that's what inspired
04:39us to start this whole thing.