Gusii Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union (GCFCU) Chief Executive Officer Robert Mainya has challenged residents from the region to embrace environment-friendly charcoal in order to protect the environment against destruction of trees.
Mainya disclosed that in order to protect the environment against degradation, the management has embarked on recycling of coffee husks into charcoal briquettes as part of its efforts of curbing the menace of dumping husks at the union's coffee milling site.
Speaking to this writer on Thursday afternoon at his Kahawa house office in Kisii town, Mainya confirmed that the project has already taken off after the installation of a briquette making machine at the Union.
The CEO further clarified that the union established the project to tap on the potential of the union's coffee milling waste to produce environment-friendly charcoal briquettes for both domestic and industrial use.
Mainya also disclosed that the project targets domestic and industrial consumers who rely on wood fuel to embrace the new source of energy for cooking and factory processing especially tea processing.
Besides addressing environmental challenges posed by dumping of the husks at the union's compound, Mainya disclosed that the project aims at scaling down the rate at which trees in the area are cut for both domestic and industrial fuel thus exposing the region to the dangers of desertification.
He said that the project will make use of husks from Mbuni and parchment husks which are carbonised and ground into various sizes of briquettes before packaging is done.
The charcoal briquette processing machine Mainya disclosed, will be producing 978 Kg per hour producing one inch domestic briquettes and one and half inch briquettes for industrial use.
"The briquettes will be packed starting from 5g, 10, 25 and 50kg and packaging will be based on the market demand for the charcoal," disclosed Mainya.
Mainya encouraged area residents to embrace the coffee husks charcoal saying that it was not only be environment friendly but was also pocket friendly to low income clients.
Mainya also challenged area tea factories to embrace the charcoal briquettes for their industrial tea processing needs to reduce their cost of fuel as the new source of energy was cost effective.