BKB Charity is supporting a sustainable project in which coal is produced from communal waste, thereby reducing the health and ecological problems which exist in Africa.
Cooking over indoor wood fires is one of the main causes of severe and deadly respiratory illnesses. Every year in Africa, around three million hectares of endangered rainforest are cleared for the production of firewood. This is made worse by the fact that families have to spend a third of their monthly income on this fuel. Money which could otherwise be invested in education or improving the family’s standard of living.
In order to improve the dire state of these people’s health and living conditions, the student initiative Enactus Aachen e.V. from RWTH and FH Aachen has come up with a clever system called “RecyCoal”, in which a low-emission and inexpensive form of bio-coal can be produced by local people on their own initiative by applying the process of pyrolysis to previously unused biomass. Bio-coal for which no trees have to be felled.
With the financial support of BKB Charity, this promising humanitarian and ecological project has been started in Kigali, Ruanda and is soon to be extended to the rest of the country and even beyond its borders.
Further information about the RecyCoal process and Enactus e.V. can be found here:
http://aachen.enactus.de/blog/projekte/recycoal/
https://www.facebook.com/recycoal