Kemit Ecology offers clean streets, cleaner fuel

The streets and marketplaces of Cameroon's economic capital Douala are strewn with fruit and vegetable debris of all sorts: banana peels, corn cobs, coffee grounds, mashed sugarcane, among others.

But one man's garbage is another's treasure, and the unsightly rubbish has become the raw material for Kemit Ecology, a startup that has developed a process for transforming the waste into fuel.

The company, launched in July 2014, sweeps the scraps off the streets and uses them to produce "organic charcoal" briquettes for cooking.

"It's an ecological solution. Collecting the rubbish cleans up the streets even before it is turned into fuel," said the startup's manager, Mueller Tenkeu Nandou.

And "from the environmental standpoint, organic charcoal emits very little greenhouse gas and practically no smoke," asserted Tenkeu, who earned a Master's in Ecology, Biodiversity and Environment from the University of Douala in 2013 and now researches renewable energy there.

The briquettes aim at substituting charcoal, for which demand is high and the environmental cost rising.