An Appealing Alternative?

Bananas at a Ghanaian supermarket. Image sourced from here.

A former roommate of mine has this favorite joke: what is Beethoven's favorite fruit? [...] The Ba-na-na-naaa. (in the style of the Fifth Symphony, 1st mvt.) Deep, I know.

Aside from being an excellent source of potassium and the subject of lame jokes, bananas, according to a science article in today's BBC Africa can also be a valuable source of alternative energy in developing countries. The article notes that,

In some African countries, like Rwanda, bananas are an important and versatile crop, used for food, wine and beer.

But experts estimate that the edible fruit makes up just a small part of what the plant produces.

According to scientists, for every one tonne of bananas, there are an estimated ten tonnes of waste, made up of skins, leaves and stems.

The skins, in particular, can be useful for energy production. Engineers at the University of Nottingham have figured out a way to turn banana waste into alternative fuel by combining it with sawdust, compressing it into briquettes and letting them dry in the sun for a couple weeks--a process that doesn't seem to require much advanced technology.

The banana fuel briquettes. Can be used much like firewood under a stove. Imaged sourced from here.

The article isn't too clear about some of the on-the-ground specifics, such as how much sawdust is needed per brick (and where would it come from? how much does it offset the compensating non-deforestation?) and how economical the bricks are for families relative to firewood. Also, are these briquettes "clean-burning"? But those might just be minor kinks in the overall design.

These briquettes have the potential to address a lot of key issues across Africa. Not least of these is female labor productivity and family well-being. Women spend a disproportionate amount of time gathering firewood for African households, a project made more arduous given rising deforestation, only to burn the firewood indoors, leading to health risks for themselves and their families. Banana waste could be gathered much closer to the point of consumption, thereby reducing the time women spend gathering fuel. And, if these briquettes turn out to be clean burning, then perhaps health costs could be cut down.

I'd like to see if NGOs pick up on this article and try to partner with these Nottingham engineers. It seems like these briquettes can be produced in either a capital-driven (like in their labs) or labor-driven process. The latter, in particular, might be useful for encouraging female employment and the building of social capital, something that could be quite handy in post-conflict areas. Who knows, maybe they could bring new meaning to the term, banana republic?