As I begun to research other organisations working in the same space as I hope to impact, I found one which has a very similar idea. 'Ushiriki Wa Safi' distributes sacks to residents for them to collect their household waste in, and then sorts the waste into scrap which can be sold (metals and plastics) and material which can be burnt [1]. This material is used to power a community cooker which residents can pay to use as well as hot water for a community bathing area. I think one of the reasons for this company's success is that it addresses the issue at a very local level. 500 sacks are distributed to collect waste and the community cooker needs only one caretaker. This made me realise that I may need to scale down my idea to a particular region of the slum to begin with. However the issue with this is that the incineration plant to create energy would need to be sizeable in order to produce enough energy to be worthwhile.
I am tasked with finding the optimum size of the area I want to target, and need to ensure that it will be sufficiently large to produce enough energy but not too large as collection will then be too difficult. I am still not sure how to do this, and am considering first pitching a pilot project which would a smaller model of the full scale incinerator. As I think the collection and sorting of waste are the main issues, this would allow experimentation and trial and error before a large scale facility is built. This will also allow me to test whether the sorting is actually being done properly by residents, as if this is the case, briquetting of waste may be possible instead of incineration, which is more environmentally friendly. This is a method used by a company called Pivot, which uses human waste to produce briquettes which are sold to cement factories [2]. The waste would need to be only organic, so this process is more sensitive than incineration and requires residents to sort the waste well. My question is whether I should pitch the pilot project to investors (which would require much less capital), or the whole project with the pilot being the first step. I do not want to undersell the idea but need to find a balance between being realistic and tackling the problem effectively.
Another issue which I need to think about is the phenomenon of 'flying toilets' in Kibera. This is when residents defecate in plastic bags which are thrown out and litter the streets of the slum, due to a lack of sanitation facilities. I realise that addressing the root of this issue would involve working on improving sanitation, though this is being currently worked on by many NGOs and is not the area I am focusing on. The plastic bags are inorganic and so cannot be used in the briquetting process, meaning that this waste would need to be incinerated. Recently, the government of Kenya announced that they are going to ban plastic bags [3]. This sounds wonderful in terms of waste management, however for many slum residents, there is no viable alternative to flying toilets and they will still need plastic bags. I foresee a black market in plastic bags, similar to what has occurred in Rwanda. However a reduction in plastic will mean less inorganic waste which will possible mean that sorting of waste will be easier. I agree that we need to reduce our use of plastic bags, however I am not sure that an outright ban is the best way to do this, especially when the government does not provide waste management and sanitation facilities to a huge proportion of the city's residents, who use plastic bags to 'manage' their waste.
[1] https://sanitationupdates.wordpress.com/2011/03/31/kibera-kenya-community-turns-garbage-into-energy-source/
[2] http://pivotworks.co/
[3] http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21719471-will-ban-make-kenya-cleaner-or-start-black-market-bags-kenya-tries
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