[Stoves] water hyacyth and combusting plastics in briquettes

[Michael N Trevor]

Let me check.  As I understand briquettes were sent to  NZ or Australia for
burn testing

On Wed, Jun 28, 2017 at 8:20 PM, Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <
crispinpigott at outlook.com> wrote:

> Dear Michael
>
>
>
> I am interested in the claimed ‘no problem’ for the glue thing. Who said
> what about which product?
>
>
>
> If you know of someone who knows of someone let’s track down the source
> story. It is a perennial question so a proper answer would be helpful.
>
>
>
> Thanks
> Crispin
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* Stoves [mailto:stoves-bounces at lists.bioenergylists.org] *On
> Behalf Of *Michael N Trevor
> *Sent:* 28-Jun-17 15:25
> *To:* Discussion of biomass cooking stoves <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.
> org>
> *Subject:* Re: [Stoves] water hyacyth and combusting plastics in
> briquettes
>
>
>
> Dear Richard delighted to hear from you.  Thanks for you detailed coverage
> and I hope other find it useful and can apply it.  The waste company here
> was still doing just cardboard and not even that for some time.  The market
> sort of collapsed after someone bad mouthed them as a hazard because of the
> glue in cardboard.  Actually they were sent out and tested and were given a
> clean report safety wise.
>
>
>
> On Wed, Jun 28, 2017 at 6:54 PM, Stanley Richard <rstanley at mind.net>
> wrote:
>
> Hello Michael,..
> Many years ago in the Shri River at the outlet of Lake Malawi and again up
> in Uganda near  the outlet of Lake victoria we experimented with the use of
> water hyacinth as a fuel for briquettes. What we learned was that the
> hyacinth dries up to almost nothing in a few days once picked in the dry
> season. Drying it out completely will leave the fibers brittle and any
> disturbance such as blending with other resources before compression,
> renders it into dust and crumbs which are pretty much useless unless bound
> by other functioning plant fiber material. However, if kept wet then
> chopped they can be great for binding up other more energy-dense & lower
> ash residues e.g.; sawdust, select leaves & grasses, charcoal dust and
> crumbs etc.,
> We were unimpressed with the burn quality of the fiber itself though. By
> itself it tends to smolder. Again however using it as a binder to
> encapsulate more combustible materials such as mentioned above, they can be
> quite useful.
> Michael, I have seen lots of woven articles baskets rugs etc made out of
> the fibers but have no direct contact with any of them.
>
> Re., the utility of burning plastics in briquettes (presumably of the wet
> process type we tout), a little story
> In  seeing the national flower of Mali  jokingly described  as the plastic
> shopping bag, I inquired about its potential and were similarly cautioned
> by many on this list about plastics combustion in general. We also
> discovered  however that both Swedish and British professional
> institutional waste management sources recommended its incineration—under
> controlled conditions— as being less harmful than dumping them into a
> landfill. What then emerged through our group was the advice that
> polyethylene, the  key source for the shopping bag-  a relatively simple
> short chain hydrocarbon, which can be burnt rather leanly if combusted
> above 400 deg c ( about  750 deg fahrenheit).
>
> Two simple  indicators of polyethylene  are in, apparently in the way it
> burns:  no black smoke and the way it smells: the smell of a simple
> paraffin candle burning. (these and a few other means of making simple
> field identification of the types of plastics are found through a simple
> google search).
>
>
> Armed with this , I made several attempts to incorporate the plastic bag
> into the briquette —-as it turned out, part of a month long consultancy in
> Bamako Mali many years ago..
> What I learned was this:
>
> 1) The plastic bag has to be shredded in, most commonly, a hammer mill to
> assure fine wispy shards of cornflakes-sized strands.  The reason is that
> wet process briquettiing we tout,  requires a relatively porous structure
> after compression and initial dewatering, in order for the retained
> moisture to emigrate from the briquette.
> 2)  The shards themselves must be really wispy-- with lots of torn edges
> The resulting fibers need to function as binders, encapsulating other
> combustibles (paper /sawdust /leaves/ grasses /straws etc etc).
> Simply cutting the plastic bags into small cornflake sizes will not
> suffice as such merely hinders binding and greatly retards moisture
> emigration.
> If you have a way to shred them per above you can quite easily incorporate
> as much as one 7 to 9 gram shopping bag into one  4” dia x 3 “ tall
> briquette   weighing 125 to 140 grams dry (at ambient moisture) .
>
> This is potentially really interesting because:
> On average ten to 12  of the above sized briquettes are required per
> family per day in a marginalized urban or rural setting. That same family
> of five persons living in mid to marginalized  conditions, consumes about
> three of these poly bags per day, thus potentially generating a real
> demand for the shopping bag where the above other resources are in short
> supply.
> There are about of course several other cultural, social  or economic
> reasons why it may not work in your own area but in Bamako  the lack of
> acceptance had nothing to do with any of these: issue had little to do with
> culture or economics but rather the politics of foreign aid.  I  discovered
> that the good aid officials  already had selected an American contractor
> for setting up a conventional garbage removal  service. He was a former aid
> official and I was just brought in to show that the bid for the assessment
> was competitive for the books. The national flower of Mali like many other
> places remains sadly, the plastic shopping bag.
>
> Its perhaps your turn now, Michael !
> Richard
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