DAY 60: Relationship of Urban Dwellers with their Garbage (Biogas)
By Dominic Wanja and Tim Mungai at Kenya Biogas International, Karen, Kenya, 24 October 2017
This workshop was part of 100 Day of Learning and aims to explore innovative ideas that can be adopted by city dwellers to convert refuse to resource. With the ban on plastic bags, which was a major income earner, this half day workshop aims to present alternative opportunities to optimize waste.
We listened to a story of a certain blind beggar who sat at the same spot day in day out hoping to at least make ends meet. Years into his career, he died in languishing poverty. A few days after his death, a chest of treasure was found right below his spot. Urban residents are staring at a mine of gold; they term it as waste and fail to see the value in it.
Rapid urban population growth coupled with changing consumption patterns and deteriorating sanitation situation in urban centers warrants a need to creatively manage refuse in urban centers. According to IRIN 2013, about 60 to 80 percent of Kenya’s urban population lives in slums which cover just 6% of the total residential land area, yet house 60% of the city’s population. Services such as sewerage, piped water and rubbish collections are virtually non-existent. More often than not city residents view waste as unsightly nuisance, they end up underutilizing the economic potential gain from refuse. Yes, garbage collection as a source of livelihood in urban and peri-urban centers has become widespread more so among women and youth who make ends meet by weaving baskets from disposed polythene bags.
Despite bio digesters becoming increasingly popular in rural areas as good sources of organic and affordable fertilizers, with cow dung and kitchen refuse being used as inputs, there is reluctance to adoption of the idea in urban areas. Yet there exists promising prospects in converting waste to a resource. Currently, land filing is the most commonly adopted waste disposal mechanism in urban centers. Take the Dandora dumping site for instance, it exposes residents to life threatening environmental pollution explaining why land filling is the least desirable option in the waste hierarchy. Adoption of a 3R eco friendly society is campaigned for, the Rs being representative of Reducing, Recycling and Reusing waste. Such a society is breeding ground for unlimited economic opportunities. Poor sanitation in slum areas, high rise apartments, public markets and sky scrapping commercial buildings are examples of such profitable opportunities. Recently, one of the largest open air markets in Kenya, Kongowea market was all over the newspaper on the menace of cleanliness in the market. Not only will bio digesters end the reign of flying toilets in slums, the tyranny of overflowing septic tanks, the horror of rotten vegetables littered markets and the unimaginable cost of regular exhaustion but will also provide profitable avenues where waste management could be converted to useful energy.
Proper use of digesters is a social enterprise. Other than presenting a sustainable way of disposing of refuse in Green cities that reduces environmental pollution, it presents a way of significantly cutting costs on fuel. KBP reports that using Methane gas generated from bio digesters could save a household up to 50% of costs on cooking fuel. Methane is a cleaner and safer source of energy. Rather than the usual garbage collection, investments in bio digesters have proven to be commercially viable opportunities. Methane gas can be sold to households for heating and electricity purposes whereas the bio slurry, a byproduct of the process, can be used as organic fertilizer and animal feeds, this option is especially useful to peri urban farmers and could save them significant amounts of cash.
While the concept of mobilizing waste to gain potential economic gain is ambitious, with the innovative technology already in place it is far from impossible. Biogas systems have already proved successful in rural India, where nearly 350 plants are fueled mainly by cow dung and the gas generated is used as a source of electrical power. Here in Nairobi, Umande Trust Community organization uses generated biogas to serve as inexpensive cooking fuel to slum dwellers in Kibera.
