Saturday, 26 November 2005
For me meeting Simeon is what the biodiesel project is all about, showing people with
the potential to exploit the technology how it works, to make it real in a way
that reading about it never could. Which reminds me, I have to summarise how my
processing plant works and put it on our website.
What’s biodiesel got to do with bicycles? Well not a lot, but the nice thing about running a
small organisation with limited funding (and therefore limited funding
conditions) and co-directors who trust me is that I can indulge any of my
sustainable transport related passions if it doesn’t cost too much money. The
bonus with biodiesel is that even with the high cost of the methanol used to
make it, it’s still only $N3.50 per litre to make, compared with $N5.10 for
conventional diesel, meaning our bicycle delivery costs are significantly
reduced. Once I perfect a soap making recipe I’ll be able to turn the glycerine
byproduct into another revenue source for BEN Namibia, so effectively our cost
for transporting bicycles across this vast country will be zero. Meanwhile if
anyone wants to buy some gelatinous jelly soap—washes your hands fine, looks
terrible—I have loads sitting in my kitchen.
If you have no idea what biodiesel is, the best link I’ve found is at http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel.html,
read on and be enlightened.
Finally, thanks to Ryan Lanctot, Bicycles For
Humanity’s webmaster, for setting this up for me (www.bicycles-for-humanity.org).
Saturday, 26 November 2005
Here it is
at last, something I’ve been promising my friends for the past 8 months—the BEN
Namibia blog. It’s
hours in the BEN Namibia warehouse showing Simeon, a Namibian forestry worker
based in Rundu, how to make biodiesel from used cooking oil. He’s about to take
a decision on a plantation of 500,000 trees, and is considering an oilseed tree
that could be used to make biodiesel to run the local people’s diesel
generators. The byproduct, glycerine, they could turn into soap and run as an
income generation project—a potentially empowering project for the local
people, who would be employed to harvest their own fuel rather than forking out
their meagre income to a multinational oil company. There’s a tree called
Jatropha, native to
about the potential of an indigenous tree, mangetti, that also produces
harvestable oily nuts. He’s going to bring down some of the oil from Rundu,
where he works, the next time he’s in Windhoek and we’ll convert it to
biodiesel so he can show the local people their own oil running their own
generator.
For me
meeting Simeon is what the biodiesel project is all about, showing people with
the potential to exploit the technology how it works, to make it real in a way
that reading about it never could. Which reminds me, I have to summarise how my
processing plant works and put it on our website.
What’s biodiesel
got to do with bicycles? Well not a lot, but the nice thing about running a
small organisation with limited funding (and therefore limited funding
conditions) and co-directors who trust me is that I can indulge any of my
sustainable transport related passions if it doesn’t cost too much money. The
bonus with biodiesel is that even with the high cost of the methanol used to
make it, it’s still only $N3.50 per litre to make, compared with $N5.10 for
conventional diesel, meaning our bicycle delivery costs are significantly
reduced. Once I perfect a soap making recipe I’ll be able to turn the glycerine
byproduct into another revenue source for BEN Namibia, so effectively our cost
for transporting bicycles across this vast country will be zero. Meanwhile if
anyone wants to buy some gelatinous jelly soap—washes your hands fine, looks
terrible—I have loads sitting in my kitchen.
If you have
no idea what biodiesel is, the best link I’ve found is at http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel.html,
read on and be enlightened.
Finally, thanks to Ryan Lanctot, Bicycles For
Humanity’s webmaster, for setting this up for me (www.bicycles-for-humanity.org).