This is a way of approaching problems different than the high-tech solutions that are often proposed. Solutions involving equipment that can cost millions of dollars that people in developing countries can't afford are not of much use. Sometimes simpler and inexpensive is better, although often not as glamorous and romantic as the high tech approaches (splitting worm holes, harnessing black holes, time travel, etc). http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/smith-award-1016.html .
ok so hitting that birquette maker with a claw hammer all day to make one birquette at a time.. yeah right gimme a break.
this nothing new at all. big fucking whoop. here is what they do: they take the carbonaceous material, burn the volatiles out, mix with a binder, and compress. main problem here is making one briquette at a time. them engineers are just blowing smoke up each other's asses.. they can go fuck themselves. i have made wood lump charcoal before.
Wood lump charcoal would be a conventional approach, but there are issues with that in places such as Haiti where wood is becoming scarce. At the same time, people were burning farming waste products for many years that could have been tapped as an energy source for cooking and used for other products as well. Part of the engineering process is to find such opportunities, although they may not be as glamorous as high tech approaches. Some people in the more developed parts of the world who have expertise in higher tech machinery may feel insulted by such low tech endeavors. They may perceive that the need for their expertise is being circumvented by clever engineers who come up with a resourceful way of solving a problem that doesn't involve high tech and dependence on skilled labor, processes that ordinary people in less developed regions can do themselves. That type of perception can lead to skilled labor being resentful toward engineers because they feel that they as middle men have gotten cut out of the deal. .
i mentioned that i had made wood lump charcoal as an aside. i understand thats the traditional way and that deforestation is a problem. the fundamentals of making charcoal from organic material are exactly the same in both processes only in making briquettes there is mixing with a binder, and pressing into small bricks. so its more engineers blowing smoke up each others asses basically. i thought the objective here was supposed to be making charcoal. another potential problem i see here is the fact that they are using a food source as binder in the process.
Websites and youtube show various approaches to making briquettes, some of them quite resourceful. One showed someone using some old automotive pieces as part of the setup. Another example similar to the OP but using a different type of waste product. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MET386b_r4"]YouTube - Haiti: Recycled Paper Charcoal .
