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NEW YORK, NY, Tues. Aug. 7, 2007: Even as Caribbean governments are being urged to find new energy sources, a Haitian student at MIT in the USA has joined with colleagues to offer nationals of his country an environmentally friendly cooking fuel. According to officials at MIT University, student Jules Walter, a Haitian national, joined with other students to create charcoal briquettes from organic material such as sugarcane waste.
The students have now created a company called Bagazo and plan to produce these briquettes as cooking fuel for Haitians to help battle deforestation.
Walter has seen firsthand the impact of deforestation in his native Haiti with nearly 98 percent of the island's forests gone and more trees being cut down every year.
Deforestation is not only an environmental problem in that country, but it also makes life difficult for Haitians who rely on wood to cook their food.
Walter and other students, Amy Banzaert and Kendra Leith, and Haitian community organizer Gerthy Lahens, recently won $30,000 in seed money from the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition.
Walter, a computer science major who will be a senior at MIT this fall, is traveling to Haiti later this month to conduct a market study and meet with potential investors. He hopes his business will appeal to those who want to invest in something that is both profitable and socially responsible.
"Traditionally people think you can either make money or help people," said Walter. "But this is a project where we really think we can do both, and do both well."
Students in MIT lecturer Amy Smith's course, D-Lab: Introduction to Development first started working to develop low-cost cooking fuels after a trip to Haiti in 2003. The D-Lab course gives students the chance to explore technological solutions to real-life problems.
"The charcoal project was one of the very first D-Lab projects, and over the years, dozens of students have worked to help create the solution," said Smith, who received a master's in engineering from MIT in 1995 and won a MacArthur Fellowship, often nicknamed the "genius grant," in 2004.
Walter and his teammates named their company Bagazo after the energy source for the charcoal: bagasse, or sugarcane waste. Sugarcane is widely available in Haiti, and corncobs and possibly other plant wastes, including banana leaves, can also be used to make the charcoal.
Several families in Haiti have tested the briquettes and liked them better than wood charcoal, Walter said. The briquettes are good for cooking because they burn longer than wood and are easier to light. They also create less smoke than wood and dung fires.
"Both of those emit a lot of smoke, especially when people cook inside their homes, and it gives them problems with their lungs," Walter said.
The Walter and company initiative comes as Chelston Brathwaite, director general of the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation in Agriculture in Costa Rica, yesterday warned, "If we continue to import at increasing prices and export at reduced prices, we face economic disaster." The comments came at a gathering in Guyana that was organized by the Inter-American Development Bank, the Organization of American States and other agencies to encourage a regional policy on alternative energy. – Hardbeatnews.com
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Haiticharcoal briquettes 
