Feasibillity And Impact Assessment Of A Proposed Project To Briquette Municipal Solid Waste For Use As A Cooking Fuel In Rwanda
briquetted logs is now a major source of energy in Europe and North America. Sweden,
a leading country on the production of pellets, utilises in excess of 1 million tonnes per
year. The spread in popularity of biomass-derived fuels is entirely due to the huge
environmental and local economic benefits. These have been made possible by
advances in technology and higher fossil fuel prices resulting from increasing levels of
taxation on Carbon Emissions.
In contrast, the production and use of briquetted fuels in developing countries over the
past 20 years have been disappointing. Many projects set up in the 1980s in Asia and
Africa have failed, mostly because of poor planning, unrealistic expectations in results
and failure to target production towards appropriate markets. Many of the lessons learnt
now appear simple and obvious but at the time, unrealistic expectations to achieve
national impacts often enticed planners to neglect the basic commercialisation
parameters including Price, Performance, People, Product and Place considered as the
5 Business Planning ‘Ps’.
This study aims to assess the socio-economic risks and the overall sustainability of
manufacturing fuels from Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) in Rwanda and to determine the
likely economic, social and environmental impacts.
