Students Develop Building Bricks from Cow Dung

A team of several students from Prasetiya Mulya Business School in Indonesia have won the 2009 Global Social Venture Competition for their “EcoFaeBrick“ - an affordable and easily manufactured,sustainable building material made from cow dung. According to reports, the bricks are 20% lighter, with a compressive strength 20% stronger than clay bricks- and their production doesn’t rely upon quarry mining techniques harmful to the local environment.

Through the use of 75%cow manure and a cured biogas heating process that reduces the brick factory’s CO2 emissions significantly over traditional wood fire heat, the EcoFaeBricks help to provide an affordable economic solution to a waste problem while curbing the destruction of the local environment caused by clay quarries. 

The group claims that the process will raise participating farmers’ incomes by 53%, which will not only help to raise their quality of life, but lead some former clay miners to begin to farm. 

EcoFaeBrick's Website:  EcoFaeBrick
Global Social Venture Competition Website: GSVC

Study Shows Bioenergy Benefits the Rural Poor

Bioenergy, when produced on a small-scale in local communities, can play a significant role in rural development in poor countries, according to a new report jointly published by FAO and the UK's Department for International Development (DFID)

(Taken from the FAO's news release)

"The study, "Small Scale Bioenergy Initiatives: Brief Description and Preliminary Lessons on Livelihood Impacts from Case Studies in Latin America, Asia and Africa," covers 15 different "start-up" bioenergy projects from 12 countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia involving a diverse array of technologies. "The furious debate around bioenergy has largely concerned liquid fuels used for transport," said Oliver Dubois, a bioenergy expert in FAO's Natural Resources Department. "Yet more than 80 percent of bioenergy usage in the world involves other sources, mainly wood, which are used for basic household cooking and heating in poor areas of the world."   Concern over the impact these transportation biofuels will have on the environment, water resources and food security has obscured many of the positive benefits for poor rural people.  The study shows quite clearly that there are a number of huge possible benefits of using new technologies for biomass-based rural energy, some very basic, others more sophisticated. 

Biofuel benefits for poor

Some of the possible benefits of bioenergy highlighted in the study include:  

• An increase in natural resource efficiency as energy can be created from waste that would otherwise be burnt or left to rot is put to use 
• The creation of useful by-products such as affordable fertilizer from biogas production  
• The possibility of simultaneously producing food and fuel through intercropping
• The creation of new financial capital with growth cycles by making use of marginal land  

Saving local resources

 "Virtuous cycles are shown to develop within communities where people have access to the energy services needed for development without money flowing out of communities for fossil fuels or local natural resources used up".  The study also shows how the use of bioenergy has often played a role in partially insulating poor rural people from the vagaries of the fossil fuel market used in times of an energy crisis, but then typically abandoned when the oil price drops. In none of the cases studied did bioenergy production appear to jeopardise food security, either because the bioenergy is produced from crops not used for food or grown on very small plots or stretches of unused land. "


Read the original FAO Press Release: bioenergy benefits for rural poor 

Read the actual study: Small Scale Bioenergy Initiatives: Brief Description and Preliminary Lessons on Livelihood Impacts from Case Studies in Latin America, Asia and Africa 

Harnessing biogas in Rural China

One of the featured projects from the Ashden Awards.

The Shaanxi Mothers' Environmental Protection Volunteer Association (Shaanxi Mothers) is led by its founder Mrs Wang Mingying. It has installed 1,294 biogas plants in rural farming households in the Shaanxi Province of China since 1999. The plants produce biogas from pig and human waste.

Xu Wenjian, Party Secretary, Miao Zuigou Village, Zou Yuan town, near Yan'an, with his biogas light and stove.

Click the following links for more details

Official Site (Ashden Awards)

http://www.ashdenawards.org/winners/shaanxi

Video (Ashden Awards)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMreH1YUs90&NR=1