Charcoal saga: What’s so hard for Kampala to turn waste into energy?

Kiteezi garbage landfill

I have visited the Kiteezi landfill, where garbage holds a daily argument with death, and I have seen a mountain that is not a mountain.

That is the mountain of shame which consumed our brothers and sisters some two years ago. That rotting empire spreads its smell from Bwaise to Gayaza and swallows one thousand five hundred tonnes every single day.

From Owino plastics and Nakasero market remains to Katwe old tyres and our own kitchen banana peels, these materials are mixed into rotting heaps that stink while breeding flies larger than cockroaches.

On the other side of the country, our forests in Mityana, Mukono, Buddu and Singo are falling and crying. Every day a chainsaw or an axe cuts through trees because Ugandans love charcoal. A sack of charcoal today is sold at Shs 120,000.

A poor mother in Nansana must choose whether to buy charcoal to cook beans or to buy books for her child. In simple terms, we are cutting our own lungs to cook our own food. The answer is to turn that garbage into charcoal.

Garbage briquettes, waste-to-energy and fuel from filth are the way forward. I’m not speaking rocket science and this has been parroted for years. Take that banana peel from your matooke, that paper which wrapped your rolex in Wandegeya, that sawdust from the carpentry in Bwaise, that cow dung from the kraal in Mubende and that charcoal dust from the old charcoal market, and compress it all.

Pound it, carbonize it and mix it with a little cassava porridge as a binder. Turn it into clean briquettes that burn three times longer, with no smoke to make you cough like an old man.

I see this regularly at science and agricultural fairs and this is simple economics that even a Primary Three child will understand. That sack of charcoal being ferried is equal to one big tree cut down.

A tree takes ten years to grow yet it is cut in just ten minutes. One sack of garbage charcoal is equal to zero trees cut. Zero. It takes two days to make garbage charcoal from garbage you were going to throw in the trench.

Imagine KCCA waking up as Rwanda did. It can set up three factories, not for collecting fines from street vendors, but for making garbage charcoal. One can be in Kiteezi, one in Mpererwe and one in Nakawa. These alone can employ over 5,000 youth.

Every youth who today wakes at to check who viewed his WhatsApp status can wake up to putting on gloves and sorting garbage, drying garbage, making briquettes, packing and distributing them.

If KCCA could make 10,000 sacks a day of garbage charcoal and sell them at Shs 60,000, far cheaper than tree charcoal. That would be Shs 600 million a day staying inside Kampala.

This would cut off the charcoal mafia from Mityana, Mubende or Jinja. In the end, charcoal loses market and there would be less cutting down of forests. As a bonus, the country would rake in extra money through carbon credits because we are saving the planet.

Kiteezi would no longer be a grave but a gold mine while Kampala would no longer be called the City of Garbage. This is not a dream. Kenya is doing it in Dandora and Rwanda is doing it in Nduba. Why not Kampala?

To the KCCA leadership, do not wait for election season to promise this. Start one pilot project. One machine costs Shs 15 million and it would require dedicating just one warehouse to show Ugandans that a sack of briquettes from Kiteezi cooks luwombo faster than a sack of charcoal from Buddu forest.

From a policy perspective, KCCA can issue ordinances on domestic waste management through a combination of mandatory household sorting. In Kigali, for example, they have a four-stream separation system covering recyclables, food waste, hazardous waste and residual waste.

I know it would take time before this sinks into the minds of Ugandans, but there is always a start. If Balaam’s ban on selling alcohol before 3 pm was starting to bite, why not this, where KCCA has even an enforcement machinery?

The author is an investor, contractor, and football enthusiast.

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