Community Cooker

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The Community Cooker is a remarkable recycling project. It has the potential to transform informal settlements and rural villages into resource rich communities.This inspiring initiative is operating within the informal settlements of 1) Laini Saba, Kibera 2) Karagita, Naivasha, and 3) Kawangware, Nairobi. Another Community Cooker is currently under construction in the informal settlement of Mathare (Village 4B). It evolved from the determination of Jim Archer, Chairman of PLANNING SYSTEMS SERVICES LTD (PLANNING), to address the massive accumulation of rubbish everywhere throughout Africa, while at the same time mitigating deforestation and reducing ground water pollution.

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What is the Community Cooker? The community cooker uses rubbish as a fuel for cooking, for baking and for boiling water. It has two complementary functions:

1) To burn rubbish thereby addressing the associated health, sanitation and aesthetic issues of mounds of rubbish almost everywhere in Africa but especially in informal settlements.

2) To provide communities with a less expensive alternative to charcoal, firewood and paraffin, for cooking meals and boiling water. The community cooker is a simple machine and can be built almost anywhere. Repairs and maintenance can be carried out by members of the community. The Community Cooker represents a low technology, low cost and socially inclusive
vision for change, engaging communities to participate in collecting rubbish to exchange for energy to cook food and heat water. Once set up, it has minimal operating expenses and can run for indefinite periods of time at minimal cost. While it is currently designed for cooking, the potential to convert energy into alternate uses exists including activities such as brick and pottery baking, hot water for institutions, soft metals smelting and generating electricity.

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How does the Community Cooker work?

1) Rubbish Collection-
A community, or specific groups or individuals collect rubbish in baskets, bags and wheelbarrows.

2) Sorting Rubbish-
Rubbish is deposited and sorted on the lowest of the three stepped steel welded mesh racks. Rubbish sorters receive training in solid waste management to ensure that non-combustible materials and materials which create harmful fumes are intercepted and removed, such as torch batteries and rubber. Biodegradable scraps that fall through become compost manure. The remaining rubbish such as plastic bags, packaging, food scraps and even flying toilets, are placed on the second tiered rack for drying. Dry materials are shoveled down the slide to the firebox.

3) Incineration-
Two simple taps are the only moving controls on the cooker: one tap controls a drip flow of recycled sump oil (discarded oil from vehicles) and one tap controls a drip flow of water. A drop of each, in equal amounts, falls onto the super-heated steel plate of the firebox, where the water v***rizes and boosts the flames, thereby increasing the temperature from about 250 degrees Celsius to more than 800 degrees Celsius (the World Health Organization (WHO) minimum burning standard for incinerators in developing countries). As the firebox gets hotter, the network of steel pipes that pass around the cooker produce hot water. As the rubbish burns, heat is distributed under 8 cooking plates on the top of the Cooker and 2 ovens in the sides of the Cooker.

4) Using rubbish as fuel-
The cooker can be used 24/7 by individuals or community groups to cook food for their own use or as an income generating activity. The cooker has 8 cooking plates, as well as two ovens each large enough to bake up to 10 loaves of bread or roast a goat.

5) Cleaner waste-
A tall chimney rises out of the combustion chamber, between the hotplates. A nearly odorless white v***r produced from the incinerator emerges from the chimney well away from the cooking area.

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How does the Community Cooker benefit the community? Recognizing that members of the community will expect to be rewarded for their efforts, the community cooker can be run on one of two basic models:

1) A community project (Barter system) where individuals bring rubbish in exchange for time using the cooking elements.

2) A community group project, where a dedicated group of people do the rubbish collection, and in turn, has full access to the cooker to use as an income generating activity. The group would either rent out use of the cooking elements and oven and use the elements and oven themselves to sell hot cooked meals, clean boiled water and bread, tea and coffee, made on the cooker. To work well the community cooker needs to be a community led initiative with careful planning and consideration given to who will collect the rubbish, what compensation will be received and how time will be allocated for use of the cooking plates, as well as the ovens. Careful planning of the solid waste management issues are also important.

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The Outcomes of the Community Cooker Initiative:

- Low income people can receive regular and reliable supplies of low cost fuel to cook and boil water.

- Woodlands, scrub-lands and arid and semi-arid zones in the developing world will regenerate as charcoal becomes obsolete, and rubbish is used as a readily available and less expensive fuel.

- Springs, streams, rivers and underground water sources will become cleaner as rubbish heaps are removed and are burned responsibly. Fish, birds, domestic livestock and wildlife as well as humans will all benefit.