Background: Wood charcoal has been the primary fuel for cooking in Ethiopia because
it is cheap and easily avialable.However, using wood charcoal has consequences on
health and pollution because of smoking. This study aims at providing a biomass as an
alternative to wood charcoal using agricultural wastes (dry leaves, coffee husk,
sugarcane trash, grass, etc) converted into charcoal briquettes to provide much needed
source of cheap fuel that is cleaner in burning.
Methods: Simple extruder machine is used as die to make the briquette
charcoal.Moreover, an effective carbonizer to change the agricultural waste into
charcoal and an effective stove to burn and use the charcoal for cooking is used.
Results: The manual extruder machine has a capacity of pressing 30kg/hr and the
carbonizer converts 15kg of input agricultural wastes into 5kg of burned charcoal with
in 25 minutes. The stove is effective so that three meals are cooked at a time using 100g
briquette charcoal.
Conclusion: As compared to wood charcoal the charcoal briquette produced from
agricultural wastes are economical, environmentally friendly, healthy (no smoke at all)
and reduce impact of deforestation.