 Good afternoon. Welcome to Engineering for Change, or E4C for short. Today we're pleased to bring you E4C's virtual salon in partnership with IEEE. On the topic of engineering a circular economy through waste energy solutions. My name is Yana Aranda and I am the president at E4C. And I'll be introducing our moderator for today's event. The salon you're participating in today is a one-in-a-series that we'll be hosting throughout the year and will be archived on E4C and our YouTube channel after the event for your listening pleasure. Both of the URLs for where you can find the recordings are listed on this slide. If you are just interested in actually tuning into additional webinars, information on our webinar series is available on our webinar page. E4C members receive invitations to upcoming webinars directly. If you have questions, comments, or recommendations for future topics and speakers, please contact the E4C webinar series team or myself. You can see the URL listed here. Now before we move on to our moderator and presenters, I'd like to tell you a bit about engineering for change. E4C is a knowledge organization and a global community of more than 1 million engineers, designers, development practitioners, and social scientists who are leveraging technology to solve quality of life challenges faced by underserved communities. Some of those challenges may include access to clean water and sanitation, sustainable energy solutions, improved agriculture, and more. We invite all of you to become members. E4C membership is free and provides access to news and thought leadership, insights on hundreds of essential technologies in our solutions libraries, professional development resources, and current opportunities such as jobs, funding calls, fellowships, and more. E4C members also enjoy a unique user experience based on their site behavior and engagement. Essentially, the more you interact with the E4C site, the better we will be able to serve you resources online to your interests. For more, please visit our website and sign up. Now as an example of the types of solutions that you can find in our solutions library, I wanted to highlight this one that is particularly relevant given that one of our speakers represents this organization. This is the Systema Via Borsa Biodigester, which will be covered in quite a bit of detail I think by Alex, but you can see just a little bit of an example here of what it looks like. In the solutions library, you can learn more about the technical performance, compliance with standards, academic research, and user provision models for any of these systems. All the information is sourced by E4C's ReachLish Fellows and reviewed by our community of experts, and it's available to E4C members free of charge. Now a few housekeeping items before we get started. Let's practice using the WebEx platform by telling us where you are in Africa. In the chat window, which is located at the bottom right of your screen, please type your location. If the chat is not open on your screen, try clicking the chat icon at the bottom of the main screen. It looks like a little bubble, which is in the middle of the slide. So I'll just get us kicked off so that you can see where I am, and we can see where you all are. So again, if you do not see the chat window, try clicking on the speech bubble that is in the middle of the slide, at the bottom of the middle of the slide. I see that folks are answering in the Q&A window. Thank you. I see some folks are in Nigeria, but you try to use the chat window. So they're a little bit different. If you are not able to see, I see an additional, there we go. Okay, so you see some folks entering. So everybody see the chat window? Kenya, there we go. All right. We're doing it. Lovely. Very good. We'll keep another lens. All right. Great. Thank you, everyone. All right. So during the webinar, you can use the, during the salon, you can use the Q&A window to go ahead and ask questions, but you can make comments in the chat window. Again, if you don't see the Q&A window, you can just click it to the icon again in the middle of the screen, and you will be able to see that. All right. Very good. Thank you so much, everyone. So if you are listening to the audio broadcast and you encounter any troubles, try hitting stop and then start. You may also want to try opening up WebEx in a different browser. So you first see webinars and salons, qualify engineers for one professional development hour. To request your PDH, please follow the instructions on the top of our professional development page after the presentation. You can also find information if you are a member in your member portal. So today we will go to about an hour and a half, depending on the volume of questions. So that's just a special note for everyone. All right. Now with that, I'm going to go ahead and introduce you to our moderator for today. Tom Decker is an analyst with a venture development firm, Factor E Ventures. His mission is to improve lives in the developing world to increase the access to sustainable energy and related services. Tom is an environmental and mechanical engineer providing technical research support to factories portfolio and internal projects. He has specialized in renewable energy technology through five years of experiential and consultant experience in hydropower, biogas, and solar panel system. Tom holds a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Resources Engineering from SUNY College of Environmental Science in Forestry and a Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Colorado State University. He was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and also is a past engineering for change research fellow. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Tom to get us started and introduce our presenters. Tom. Thank you, Iyana. And thank you, everyone, for tuning in to the virtual swan today. Very excited to introduce our panel participants and very excited about the discussion, the upcoming discussion revolving around waste to energy in the circular economy. So first, I would like to thank Alex Eaton, Ignatius Wakwa, sorry for butchering that Ignatius, and Yos Vanderent. So first I wanted to give an introduction to the concept of waste to energy, the technology categories within waste to energy, and the current market situation around waste to energy. Beginning with the technology categories, waste to energy is one that is very exciting because utilizing waste and converting the resource into energy closes certain loops that would otherwise be left open. And there are certain opportunities to convert waste to energy that fall within different categories, and the first is biochemical. And this one is potentially the most exciting going forward and has the most significant growth of all the sectors within waste to energy with a 9% anticipated growth year over year. And with a $30 billion a year market, that 9% growth is very significant. And the next would be thermal chemical. And this is the most dominated waste to energy conversion category on the market today, representing nearly 80 to 90% of the total market of converting waste to energy. Other categories include energy efficiency, converting waste heat to electrical energy or mechanical energy. And another category is processing and upgrading, so potentially converting waste to higher value products such as briquettes or converting a certain waste products that may still have high value in terms of methane and converting that to higher value products such as dimethyl ether. So those are a couple of examples of the different technology categories within waste to energy. And I would like to move on and get started to the main part of the show here, which is the introduction to our panelists, their roles in their organizations that they're involved in and potentially some of the technologies they're involved in. And then move on to a few pertinent questions that we have for our questions that we hope will achieve some of the objectives that we've set for today so on. And then end this one with some time for Q&A for our panel participants. So before I get started and hand over the conversation to Alex from Systema.bio, I would like to just go over the objectives first. First, at a high level, we really would want to understand these technologies that I talked about in their place among the range of energy solutions in Africa. Second, we want to learn about the technology advances that can drive scale. And third, we'd like to consider the potential challenges to this technology's viability. And I hope through the questions that I pose to our panel participants and the discussion that follows, we can hit those objectives and really learn more about the waste energy market. So without further ado, I'd like to turn it over to Alex. Thanks, Tom. Good morning, everyone. I'm actually calling in from Mexico City, which is our headquarters here. And I'm really happy to tell you a little bit about Systema Biomodular Biogas Company. And I'll just start a little bit by the sort of what we're doing and who we're trying to serve. We are really moved by the fact that 80% of the calories consumed on Earth today are grown by small farmers. And it's really important to remember that this is a group of people that are extremely important in the overall management of arable land. But really, it's a group of people that systemically lack access to good technology, good training, and importantly, financing to make investments in their small farms. So we see a number of really important reasons why technology should focus on small-holder farmers. Specifically, about a billion of the poorest people on Earth, so living on less than $2 a day, are small farmers. Small farmers are growing a huge amount of the food that's consumed today yet are the most likely to have food insecurity. And overall, it's a huge group of people. We're talking probably between 2 and 2.5 billion people live on farms or in their household make part of their income through farming. So kind of with that said, from the social side, there's a huge opportunity to attack poverty, but also on the environmental side, obviously agriculture accounts for just over a fifth of greenhouse gases produced today. And in this slide, you can see how that kind of breaks out but into livestock and some of the other activities that come from that. So we really try to address just over three quarters of that impact from agriculture in the systems that we work with converting waste to energy. And so our work is to really address three critical factors for farmers, which is kind of at the heart of this panel here. First is the waste management system. Most farms don't have a very well-developed waste management system. And what we're seeing in small-holder agriculture around the world is that space is very, very limited. So you end up having these huge piles of animal manure and big ponds of animal manure really closely packed around where people are living without really good management potential for that. A lot of farmers are still using biomass fuel to meet most of their energy needs. And a lot of this happens on a three-stone fire or really underdeveloped stoves. So that is obviously a driver for both deforestation and the number of health impacts. And finally, we have a situation where there's farmers are living either with extremely limited access to agricultural inputs and or are still living sort of a slow, rolling version of the Green Revolution where over-fertilization and an inefficient use of chemicals and pesticides are creating infertility in the soil, contaminating local waterways, and in many cases locking farmers into economic cycles of inputs and credit that are quite abusive and leave farmers in the cycle of poverty. So kind of with that panorama of who we're trying to work with and who we're trying to reach, our solution is really very, very simple, probably really well known to everybody here, in that what we're doing is converting small amounts of organic material from farmers' homes to create clean energy for cooking to displace that and to help them convert those nutrients into usable agricultural inputs to reduce, either increase their yield or reduce the amount of chemical fertilizers that they're using. And I'll tell you a little bit more detail about the product exactly. But first, at the end of the day, it's a biogas system, which has the technology that's really existed in some form or another for almost a hundred years. And it's existed around the world in lots of different forms. What we tried to do was create a technology that met a number of very simple criteria. So when we sat down to design, we were really looking at the limitations of the site-built systems, which were most of the brick and mortar and some of the more basic plastic systems that were built in site. And what we saw is that we really needed a system to be extremely durable. So be able to resist UV and resist all the hard conditions that are found in a farm, really easy to install. We wanted to think about scale in terms of how quickly we could get systems in the ground and working. And they had to be a range of different sizes. We serve farmers from about two to 200 cows in waste equivalent. So that's two orders of magnitude of treatment capacity that we're able to provide. And then the systems are modular, so we can connect them. Farmers can grow over time, but we can also take the systems out. So that allows them to be used as a guarantee for asset financing. You can see here a little bit the scheme of what we're working with, a very simple reactor with the waste hopper, a really nice user interface on the way in and bioslurry storage on the way out. And then we can basically run the gas that we capture in the system at very low pressure into a simple cooking solution. So different burners and stoves that we designed for different markets and water heaters. And then we can also run a series of engines on biogas that allows us to run chaff cutters and processing of grains and water pumps and milking machines and that sort of thing. And that same engine or other engine platforms can also produce electricity that can be used for onsite or actually put back into electrical grids where that's available. So that's a bit of the overview of the technology. We work with three market segments within the overall small farmer market, subsistence farmers. So you can see in the foreground here our smallest system, six cubic meters, that's enough for a family to fertilize about three hectares and have four to five hours of cooking gas a day. The small holder farmer, the kind of young entrepreneur that we're trying to focus on would use our middle range of systems. So somewhere between eight and 40 cubic meters. And that's basically for farmers with say 10 to 80 cows and really working to build up these small businesses. And then we also, the modular nature of our system allows us to reach larger farmers. So up to 200 cows or 2000 pigs in waste equivalent, where we can interconnect the systems and provide secondary slurry management and more advanced treatment options where that's necessary. So that's kind of the range of the technology and farmers that we're working with. You can see we have a range of biogas appliances from stove, simple boilers, heating systems for piglets, heat exchangers for heating, heating space, and running more industrial boilers as well. This is sort of a look at the different types of productive mechanical and electrical generation. We've been running a lot of water pumps recently as well, which is obviously a big need in rural areas. And the bio fertilizer application is probably where we see the most opportunity. The fundamentals within anaerobic digestion really allow the carbon chains and manure to be broken down and make those nutrients available for farmers. So we're working on different irrigation systems and transport schemes that allow us to both build the bio fertilizer into other organic practices like compost and also be able to transport and commercialize that. You can see we've worked on more advanced application processes and we have farmers with tracks of 20, 40, 50 hectares under management using the bio fertilizer. Today we operate out of hubs in Mexico, Nicaragua, Colombia, Kenya, and India. So from those hubs we serve other countries in the region and we estimate that we're probably working with a market of about 100 million farmers from the markets where we're operating today. That's a team of about 150 full-time staff with about 300 other promoters and field technicians that work with us as well. So just very quickly to close, just to add a tiny enterprise angle here, we see our businesses broken up into three distinct pieces. The first is all the manufacturing and distribution of our product lines. We manufacture all the reactors and assemble all the other parts and pieces so that this is a system that comes as a complete kit and we transport those around the world and then also cover the last mile. And then all of the outreach is really done as an educational model that allows us to introduce this technology into rural areas where it's not that well known. Sell the system and then maintain and service, make sure that there's a full training for farmers and periodic follow-up. And then we finance all of those systems or a percentage of those systems with a zero percent interest loan that allows farmers to divide their payments over time and manage the investment as the benefits are paid back to them. So that's just a quick overview of our technology and kind of how we get it to the field. I'm happy to take questions after. Thank you, Alex, for the introduction to Systema Bio. Next, we'll try to see if we can get Ignatius on the line. Ignatius, are you able to speak so we can hear you? Yeah, so basically I'm going to present about Rote West to Energy. I was a research fellow for Energy at the Engineering for Change in the 2018 cohort. And I work at Stratmo Energy Research Center. And I am a research assistant. I basically work on renewable energy research. And I'm also the membership development chair of the IEEE. So I'm going to talk about Rote West to Energy, which is a west to energy technology that is being employed in Africa, actually the first of its kind, that has a capacity of 50 megawatts and can actually convert between 1,400 tons of waste every day. And yeah, that is what I'm basically going to talk about. And I'm trying to move the slides. So like I told you, Rote West to Energy is Africa's first major Rote Energy facility in Ethiopia. And the inauguration of the project was in August 2018. And like I told you before, the facility has a capacity of 1,400 tons of converting 1,400 tons of municipal waste, which I think is a big thing in sub-Saharan Africa. It's also important to realize that the waste in sub-Saharan Africa has a very low calorific value and is very moist. So this waste energy technology actually takes into account this and is a unique waste energy technology. This is a big thing in Africa, in my opinion. This is an example. This is the photo of the plant in Addis Ababa. I also think that Rote Energy is an important technique, considering that the population is growing in urban Africa. And with the increase in population, there's also an increase in the waste disposed in urban cities. Thank you. Okay, thank you Ignatius. Ignatius, can you make a just a quick comment around where you're calling from and a little bit more about Strathmore Energy Research Center? Just a quick note on that. I think that would be be interesting and relevant. Okay, thank you. I'm telling from the Strathmore area had a problem connecting earlier. So I work at Strathmore Energy Research Center and at Strathmore Energy Research Center we do three main things. We carry out research on renewable energy project. We also carry out capacity development in renewable energy. We have trainings in solar installation and designs through technicians in three categories that specify the energy regulatory commission of Kenya. And we also carry out testing of solar pico systems, like solar home systems and solar lanterns. Yeah, thank you. Okay, great. Thank you Ignatius. And thanks for the introduction to the Waste to Energy Plant in Ethiopia. Very exciting to see that progress and to see some evidence of the construction of the facility here on this current slide. So now I'd like to introduce Jos, Jos, if you're there and are ready to introduce yourself and in Safisana, it's all yours. Yes. Good afternoon, morning, Al. My name is Jos from the MTA. I work with Safisana. I give a small introduction in what we do with Safisana. So currently the reality is that there's a lot of toilets currently built in Ligana in this picture. Where you can see that often the waste is just dumped. From here it just goes into the sea and treats it. What you often see as well is that the different waste streams are being gathered together in the drains. As you can see here in the front, you see a liquid waste combined with rubbish, organic waste. And this is just close to where people live. So here you see that 80% of the wastewater is currently ends up in the in the sea without any treatment. From the WHO, it's the number you see, fecal waste streaming into the sea near Acra. And 20% is treated. And often in western worlds you go to high Capex and OPEX systems. This is just an example of one of these systems. And if you go to Ghana for example, there's often a lack of ownership or a lack of maintenance which make them break down. There's illegal dumping, malfunctioning. So that actually gives the opportunity. There's a growing demand for nutrients and energy. So there's a system where you can recover nutrients in the waste stream, collect biogas and bring it back to the grid. I think as Alex already said as well. So Savsana has a PPP construction, a public private partnership, where we collect waste from public toilets. We collect organic waste. We use an anaerobic digester. Similar technology as Alex was pointing out, but we are on a larger scale. Like this current factory has an 1800 cubic meter digesting. We have a processing there to make it the organic compound to make it into a nutrient-rich compost. And we have a generator to produce electricity which can feed back into the grid. We have a slightly more detailed slide in how the processing looks like. At step one and two I just mentioned here. We mix the waste to something like a slurry. We put it into an anaerobic digester. From there we can concentrate solids and use thermothalic composting to hygienize the material. And with the gas we can use the electricity and feed it into the national grid. So here you see truck drivers who are collecting fecal waste. This is a public toilet near our factory. This is some pictures where they are collecting the waste from the markets. And here you see on the background you see the digester. And in front you see a truck delivering fecal sludge. And in this slide you see where there is an unborn manure. So the contents of cow stomach from a slaughterhouse which is fed to the digester. Market waste. And here we have the processing of solips where we go into the composting which you can see here where we measure the temperature for the pathogen die off. And in the end the material is grinded and bagged into bags of compost. And I was going through the farms. And this is the inside the control panel of our generator. So we actually use a lot of community engagement. Like this is an example of the market queens who are happy to get rid of their organic waste because it gives a nuisance there. It attracts rodents if it doesn't collect. Meanwhile we are a reliable person or company to collect the waste. So they are guaranteed that it is collected every day. So the way forward. So we now have a factory in Ghana in Accra where a shaman which is in the greater Accra region. And there are several leads currently ongoing in Uganda, Africa, Ghana, South Africa and in Zambia. And for the impact we are now from 125 we intend to reach to 500,000 people in 2022. So this is the team in Ghana. That was the end of my presentation. I think I should give it back to Tom now. Okay. Yes. We can take the slides from here. Yos, thank you for the introduction to yourself and to Safisana. Similarly exciting to see the growth of waste energy solutions in Ghana. So thank you again. And I think at this point what we will do is transition from introductions to each of our participants' institutions and technologies and transition over to a few questions that I think will initiate a discussion around some of the key topics of waste to energy. And the first one is a bit higher level in that we're seeing a progression of our world's power generation and supply and supply of different forms of energy to the people that need it. So our traditional power sources for electricity and for energy demand in general has been sourced from fossil fuels, fuels such as natural gas, methane, LPG, coal, oil. And we're moving into a world where renewables are becoming more and more prevalent and the technologies that enable us to convert waste into energy are becoming more and more common. Now the question that I'd like to pose and I'll have some specific orientations for each of our panel members is how do our waste to energy solutions that we talked about on the panel today compare to traditional energy sources? And I'd like to actually include renewable energy sources here as well because I see some differentiations between and certain sectors of waste to energy between renewable and waste to energy. So part of an angle on this question is is there potentially ambiguity around whether or not waste to energy approaches are renewable and the significance of their climate impacts. So we've kind of been able to see different streams of turning waste into energy through our previous introductions. So in some cases we have organic animal waste, in other cases we have food scraps, in other cases we have human waste, and then human solid waste and in some cases municipal solid waste. So we have different streams that can be converted into energy and how are those streams of waste turning into energy comparing to our traditional energy sources and our renewable energy sources? So Alex if you could start and talk about SystemaBio's thoughts around the similarities and differences are there, is waste to energy in your situation more flexible than our traditional energy sources? Is the target customer base different than the target customer base of our of our existing power generation and energy assets? Are costs cheaper? Some of those some of those metrics could you use those to talk about about what you think how your approach compares to our traditional and renewable energy sources? Sure Tom that's a great and really complete question. Definitely I mean I think I would potentially reframe the question a little bit in that today it's going to be more and more important and you just mentioned this that the recovery of nutrients and relinking organic waste streams back into soil productivity and ensuring that we're closing nutrient cycles makes a lot of these technologies and approaches make sense directly and so if we start looking at energy as the by-product of a rational nutrient management system then I think that that really informed the answer to the other part of that question which is how does it compare to other energy sources? So I mean if we first sort of consider that you can effectively look at this energy as as almost free or a by-product of that other process then obviously it makes sense from an economic point of view. The the other thing that's really interesting about the most common or the the waste energy system that was most presented here which is anaerobic digestion is that we're producing a natural gas and I think apart from fully electrified world I think that there's still a lot of use of gas based energy systems specifically in the clean cooking sector it's really hard to compare any biomass like direct biomass options to having a clean cooking gas in terms of just impact and ease of use for for clients and in the fact that we can now take that gas and produce mechanical energy directly or produce electricity that then can tie in with other energy systems means that that diversity I think is extremely important. The other is just the the ability to make sure that we're making systems in a deep energy in a decentralized way and in the hands of the people that are using it is is quite empowering but also makes the energy system overall a bit more robust so sort of thinking here about either mini-grids or farmers that are a bit more self-sufficient or having multiple production points for national grids it really helps make that energy system stronger and finally the it's really hard to compare waste to energy energy systems with others in terms of greenhouse gases and and the environmental benefits because as soon as you pile on the greenhouse gas reduction from the waste treatment itself and from displacing chemical fertilizers and from displacing traditional energy forms you really have a much much stronger impact and so you know I'm a huge fan of solar energy it's just you'll never find a solar panel that's also going to make organic fertilizer at the same time so I think the reality is is that we need a really robust mix of renewable energies in the next couple years and quickly so I think there's no real valid point trying to compare one with the other exactly but but I think the waste energy is clearly shown that it can be economical especially in the approaches that were shown here trying to keep the technology more accessible. Great thanks Alex for that that thorough answer and one of that one of those few last points that you made I think is is really significant in that displacing fertilizer through the anaerobic digestion process and and is a really important one in terms of climate implications and certainly with the Haber-Bosch process of creating metrogen-based fertilizers is a heavy pollutant and contributor to climate change so that that point I think really does hit home and is part of the reason why I think we're seeing much faster growth in the biochemical region of waste energy compared to some of the other sectors. So while we're on anaerobic digestion I'd like to pose the question to Yos. Yos the approach of sapisana is is different than system of bios in that it's a much larger system it's it is more centralized. Can you talk about how a centralized and larger system and maybe you have a different perspective of sapisana centralized or decentralized. Could you talk about how that affects the the flexibility and cost and then what what types of energy are you able to provide to to the people that need it is it electricity is it is it cooking gas could you could you talk about how that compares to some of the traditional energy sources. Yes so first of all there's indeed a different target group compared to biosystems. We are in the very urban urban areas so much more people per square meter there's much more pressure on the environment or the need of waste conversion or treatment. So what you see now is that also things are just dumped inside drains providing all of diseases so if you look at our system we're not a renewable or sustainable energy producer as focus we are using it to sustain the treatment of waste so it's a combination as Alex already mentioned as well different aspects so it's the service that people get their waste treated you produce some electricity with looking at national level it's it's a minor contribution but because we are able to sell it we can sustain the rest of the factory and and also reuse the nutrients and bring back to farmers in we we intend to stay to local farmer pockets and looking at the skill indeed you need larger cities like a shaman we are now it's two hundred thousand two hundred twenty thousand people they have a massive growth of like nine percent per year or something and and the infrastructure needs to grow with that same same speed so they are in the need of waste treatment there. So if you look at it you can reduce the CH4 the methane emissions because currently it's often dumped in uncontrolled dump sites so there you make an environmental contribution meanwhile you can use the energy to bring it on the grid so in our case it's the national grid so we don't have any local or not per se local beneficiaries in that sense but it goes into the national grid as a percentage of renewable energy um yeah I think that that answers your question more or less someone yes yes it does that that's great thanks for clarifying Jocelyn and thanks for the for further insight into Sao Kisana's approach now Ignatius I'd like to to focus on the municipal solid waste plant in Ethiopia we've talked about converting organic biomass whether that be from humans from livestock or from from waste food but now talking about converting municipal solid waste streams such as household trash industrial trash into electricity without the the process of interrupt with digestion so now we're talking about thermochemical conversion of waste to energy could you talk about the climate implications of such a process there are different types of emissions associated with that and and yes it does displace other other sources of energy so I was hoping you could dive into a bit more detail there and give us some of your insights on on that process okay thank you um first um the waste to energy uh project in Ethiopia is is a waste generation project where the waste is is actually banned combustion of of the waste like you're saying so this method is one uh compared to other conventional methods of energy generation it is very expensive uh because it is it is capital intensive and operation and maintenance of the system is expensive uh however there are European standards that govern um controlling of such systems and uh it is very interesting to notice that the repuse to energy uh planting in Ethiopia actually uses this European standards to make sure um the actually make sure that they clean they clean up the effluent from the from the plant because if this is not taken into consideration then you're actually going to make more more pollution into into the environment and it becomes more dangerous and the aim of of such plants is to reduce the amount of waste that is generated in the cities yet also generate electricity which is a scarce resorting resource in in Africa um so in regards to this uh when comparing it to other conventional energy sources I will say um waste to energy solutions are similar to conventional energy sources in that they help to solve energy need in Africa and they require high initial capital cost um also uh remembering that uh this waste that is left in landfills um contributes to uh uh uh there's a lot like Ian has just said there's a lot of methane that is um that is exposed to the air when you have your waste um in landfills and this methane will be is about it's 25 percent more potent as a greenhouse gas compared to carbon dioxide and so as much as you need to take a lot of question uh uh when handling waste incineration uh it also helps uh reduce greenhouse gas emissions and um and and saves you space because you you're able to do everything with the waste you have and also an advantage of having of waste incineration with it's renewable energy source because we'll see in Africa uh like for example in Nairobi Nairobi generates 2475 tons of municipal waste per day but 50 percent of this is only collected and 50 percent is left in the city because you will find a lot of uh waste disposed in in african cities um compare the same there salam the same so um i will say um it's it's it's it's if you handle if you stand standard in in in a great way then um the rest the rest the rest to energy solution um using waste incineration could be could actually be be a great a great solution yeah that is my i think that answers the question fantastic yes thanks Ignatius for that perspective now with with about 10 minutes left of the discussion before q and a i'd like to combine our our last two questions and pose them to our participants here and really just going forward and looking into the future the potential of waste to energy is very high it's a growing it's a fast growing market with really exciting opportunities and technology development however how do we get to that growth how do we encourage that growth and how do we how do we speed that growth up is the question that i'd like to ask is is what are the challenges and limiting factors right now currently for each of the technologies that we've spoken about and what are the key advances that that we can make or that are currently being made to overcome those challenges and limiting factors so the question specifically is are these are these advances in technology innovation are they in business model development are they in building capacity of customers or of policymakers to understand how waste energy can be built in to the market and to speed that growth up so i'd like to start again with alex and and and ask from your perspective how would you how would you approach the the key advances what are you currently doing and how are those solving some of those challenges and limiting factors that hold back scaling thanks i'm and that's a really good question that we think about a lot we i think my answer can be quite short we can see all the technologies here have all been relatively mature for quite a long time the biggest challenge is really the systems management and kind of political and social will to really replicate these by many orders of magnitude which is what we really need to address the magnitude of the problem so i think really we wouldn't have to advance any technology to reach hundreds of millions of people or hundreds of millions of farms and so i think really what we need is more innovation in the financing you know we need better from our point of view we need you know better and more fair agricultural supply chains that give farmers better opportunities to invest and we need just more rational energy and and agricultural policies that really push systems that are designed for sustainability great thanks thanks alex and yos could you provide your perspective yes so since we're more in the urban setting i often see indeed you need a strong governmental support but but there is a big need for for samples so for example they they need to see something working before they will promote it so that that's actually where we are now another difficult thing is that you're often competing since we're in in the ppp construction you're competing often in doing nothing so every processing you do is often taking you more forward which is is hard to finance as well and if you look at a technical challenge i think that it would be good that there's more urban planning at at cities or like regions where for example you can make interesting combinations like waste incineration together with a biogas plant if you if you could get some sources separated because the the the moisture content inside the the waste streams can decrease the waste incineration efficiency so if you could separate them you could even get to more optimized systems so that's my answer great thank you yos and just just as a quick housekeeping notice we have a couple more minutes left of this discussion i hope to turn this over to igneous to to wrap this up and then we'll get to the questions that we're seeing here in the chat we're having some great questions come in thank you for the participation it seems we'll dive into some more technical notes but just to wrap up igneous could you could you talk about again the the challenges and limitations that maybe maybe overcome and what's currently being done to overcome those with with municipal solid waste to energy um um the greatest challenge of uh municipal uh waste uh conversion to energy is the high capital and maintenance cost and i think the solution to this is to have government incentives like like uh one i've just said before um because this will help and encourage the app to go off the technology also uh encouraging technological development and uh innovation around this will will actually make the technology cheaper because when you look at fossil fuels the uptake of fossil fuels uh is cheaper right now because it had a very huge uh there was a very huge government incentive on fossil fuels so i think this model could also be taken up but i would like to focus on africa because there's one thing in most cities in africa uh we don't have a regular waste collection and disposal services so this could be a limiting factor to such technology and they're also very limited financial resources so here the government could come in and they've limited technical capacity and poor infrastructure around around waste to energy and uh that's where um institutions like start more energy research center comes up with capacity development uh solutions like uh recently came up with a biogas so biogas training to turn and encourage uh uh organic waste to energy development and also the not and uh these are not in the weak enforcement of environmental legislation by the government and environmental awareness so if this could be looked into i think uh waste to energy technology could be more popular like solar is popular right now okay fantastic so thank you everyone for listening into the the discussion with our panel participants now we'd like to move into the question and answer section of of this virtual salon we continue to have good questions come in the chat i would like to to continue to encourage all of our our listeners and participants to ask more questions as we go along we have about uh 30 minutes of of questions that can be asked and we'll start that discussion start that discussion now so we we've been able to talk about the potential of waste energy the different approaches to waste energy some of the limitations and and challenges and the approaches to solving those and it looks like you know there's technologies that have existed and that are well developed and you know really the challenges around capacity around the skills needed and and policy and government incentives to get these these waste energy technologies deployed and to utilize the the wide range of waste products that we have in our world and convert them to useful energy and deliver that energy to the people that need it are really the the challenges here and and getting those deployed in an effective and efficient way and in the markets that will facilitate economic success so i i think the the future is exciting for waste energy and we do have a technical audience here so i think it would be useful to dive into some of the some of the technical questions iana do you have anything to add before we we dive into these questions no other than i just wanted to note so that i see that we have a mixture of questions being asked in the chat as well as some folks that are virtually raising their hands so why don't we take the questions in chat first and then we're going to try to swing over to the folks who have raised their hands we're going to turn on your audio on youtube if you will and we're going to ask you to introduce yourself before you ask your question just say you know where are you delian from and and then pose your question so that's more on the admin side and i take it over to you tom okay great the first question and i'm going to summarize a few of these together is there's some curiosity around how the efficiencies of waste to energy compared to other renewable sources such as hydropower and solar and what are the associated life cycles of the technologies of the waste energy technologies so i i'll open that up to our our panel members and just see if somebody feels feels like they could answer that directly yeah i i think the question is is interesting and useful for for comparison but at the same time it's a little tough so when you're defining efficiency of a hydroelectric dam are you talking about the the efficiencies of the turbine i mean obviously we have solar efficiencies of the energy that the only way that these really compare very well to each other is when you compare uh installed cost and potentially environmental damage so we already know that there's a lot of environmental damage that comes from from hydropower we've seen the impacts of hydropower over time we know that there's greenhouse gas effects and and it's a pretty large sum cost in terms of actual infrastructure building and then maintaining reservoirs and things over time so it gets really hard to compare kilowatt hour to kilowatt hour over time what we've done is some comparisons of our installed capacity and and right now we can install say electrical converted into electrical capacity for you under a dollar watt which is i think really competitive with most other renewable energy systems that are out there and so i think when you start looking at those different comparisons it's useful but at the same time we really in terms of clean energy we kind of need all of them going at full speed right now so in terms of them being competitors with one another i don't think so because where you have waste to energy systems um it's because you already have waste there so you might have sun as well or you might have hydro resources there's no reason not to use use all of them so i i appreciate the question but i don't think we should be necessarily trying to compare head to head these these energy systems when when we're really talking about waste treatment that provides energy as a byproduct uh i also have uh something to add on um i also like alex was saying i i don't understand what you mean by efficiency but the question is actually good but looking at hydropower um like an example in africa i will see that hydropower is a very seasonal uh source of uh electricity there are times where utility companies in africa will duration electricity because their base load actually dependent on hydropower but you see now um when you look at um waste to energy solutions uh there's a lot of waste being generated every day and keep in mind that the urban population is growing so this means that this is basically waste to energy is a renewable resource in that uh the the resource will always be there it will be difficult to deplete uh the the the resource in in the long term and um also as i said when we look at solutions okay i'm a big fan of solar energy but this is just a question for you to think um solar solar will last for about 20 years but what happens to the solar panels that are made out of silicon after the 20 years will have a lot of waste from solar panels and this is something to think about probably 20 or 30 years from now you know because um we need to know how to handle such such wasting feature so that is just for you to think yeah thank you okay thanks thanks alexis and ignatius i think just to chime in on the efficiency piece i think you have different different modes of conversion with with anaerobic digestion and biogas you may have you may have your chemical to mechanical chemical the thermal or chemical to electrical conversion efficiencies that range across the board and you'll get different numbers for for each of those and then with hydropower you have your hydraulic to electrical or hydraulic to mechanical efficiencies and typically those efficiencies are much higher than than in hydropower systems than if you are combusting a gas or combusting whether it's biogas or whether it's uh sin gas from a municipal solid waste plant so those those efficiencies are out there and they're in the literature and they range from situation to situation so i i think it's interesting but alexis point of of focusing on the entire renewable energy system progressing that as fast as we can and deploying that is is really important and we're seeing evidence of that across the world in both policy and implementation and it's a big it's a big point of emphasis across the world so i think waste energy has a big place to play uh in in that in that movement so let's see if we can get another question here okay so could we speak oh go ahead we try to take maybe try to take one of the folks that have raised their hand their virtual hand that they've been waiting for some time so uh will ask uh are surely to help us unmute those folks and see if their audio is working so why don't we go to fred fred tege yes hello um my name is frens i guess i'm from kenya a student at uh kenya to university i e section my question is you're currently working on our projects that has to do with farmers and uh sensitizing them about uh recycling waste and i uh producing energy renewable energy so the project utilizes iot uh data science and other methods so my question is is there opportunities for such projects to be funded or what kind of support exists out there for such um vicious projects hi fred um this is alex here we're operating in kenya i mean i think that there's uh and there's a couple other initiatives working on on biogas around you so i think um there's probably an interesting uh amount of of demand that could be created from enterprises that are that also are trying to move these forward there's a there's a biogas program in kenya run by uh snv evos um and it's called the kenya biogas program where there might be some some interest for those uh types of interventions and and also kenya right now is getting quite a lot of attention for for innovation around energy so um powering africa and in a few of the other international development programs with focus on on farmers could be a good place to look um specifically what is your technology you said it's um programming for improving people's perceptions on waste utilization yes uh yes it's a system that basically gives farmers information they are able to analyze um get data from their farms and also get ways in which they can be able to get rid of forest and also convert them to um it sounds really interesting you kind of cut up there at the end but um i mean i think what you can see here uh from the organizations that are represented is that we're really um you know focused on enterprise solutions so trying to prove demand in a business model for the the services in tech so um it'd be interesting to hear what you guys are doing and and see opportunities where you could maybe grow that as a startup uh hello fred also to add on um there's a there's the ishow posted by the american society of mechanical engineers i think the call for applications is is open um and and you can have your project uh in the competition and you you might stand a chance of winning or getting uh adana also we have the kenya climate innovation center we are the welcome innovations and um at stradmore university we have a training course on on on naturally uh waste incineration uh to energy but biogas to a training on biogas to energy so you're very welcome there are such there are such opportunities around yeah thank you um there's a small um side note as well is that that we are on a different skill but we have in the training packages for for our plant operators and we use mobile telephones uh to collect data um but uh if it's more about information providing uh then indeed you might have to go to uh to different uh type of systems um you also mentioned iot fred so um we have been looking into that as well but uh one of the things to consider there is be aware that sensors uh need maintenance as well and they can give you wrong data if you're going into automated measurement thank you everyone so just for those of you who are looking at the chat we've added some of the links to some of the resources noted by our panelists so feel free to take a look at any of those so uh we're going to take one more of of our virtual handraisers here um and uh turn over to Solomon Solomon uh we'll just unmute you here and we should be able to ask your question please let us know where you're joining us from and uh who you are Solomon Solomon we hear some of your background but we don't hear you would you like to try again okay i'm not sure if Solomon has stepped away so why don't we just we'll come back to him one more time and uh tom i i take it over to you to take some of the online questions in the chat yes thanks yana one common theme that that continues to come up is how do each of your approaches address toxic materials in the effluent streams of of your technology so for internal digestion and the and the the effluent of the digester how are the effluents being treated on a technical level and in the municipal solid waste incineration process how are toxic materials being handled potentially in the emission stream and in the ash stream after the fact on our side it's um actually really quite straightforward we are very clear about what goes in into the system and and what its use is and so we we generally only have to kind of think about um volatile solids reduction to try to provide the organic treatment to stabilize the waste and then also um think about pathogens on on the back side so um at the temperatures we operate in the retention times we're consistently achieving 98 to 99 percent pathogen reduction just within the anaerobic steps and then we provide another aerobic treatment process for the for the waste that comes out before it's applied to the soil so we are able to meet international standards for for pathogens for soil application we don't recommend the the effluent for say foliar feeding and those sorts of things we feel really good about building uh adding the the effluent back to the soil um as a as a soil amendment so in in that case we don't have varied waste streams in in that sense and so we're generally not impacted by um by some of those other heavy metals and other questions uh like the rapid waste to energy project in in Ethiopia and they have two two treatment methods one they clean about uh the plant can clean about 220 cubic meters of waste leashes uh every day so so this is a data that drains from a landfill and can be dangerous once it gets into contact with rivers and can pollute water and um heavy metals and be exposed um in water that can be used for drinking and and for other domestic applications um also the fluid gas is is treated is treated according to uh the EU waste management regulation that I'd also spoken about because if this is not taken into consideration um there will be a lot of harmful emissions such as dioxins and and heavy metals into into the and you'll have uh you might have solved the problem like what you're trying to solve one of the problems you're trying to solve from a waste to energy plant use also to reduce greenhouse emissions and to solve the environment so you'll have actually uh led to another problem so these are two two cleaning methods that um are used at the EU waste to energy our plant in Ethiopia thank you yes so so in in our case it's also the pathogens which are the main focus indeed but if you look at our whole processing we have several barriers built in for that uh with one of the main importance one is is thermophilic composting where we have uh high temperatures up to 60 70 degrees uh for at least a week um and we monitor this to guarantee the the pathogen dial other barriers are like time of application so in in the case you have seedlings uh you grow it takes a long time before you actually harvest the crops so in that combination we have a safe product as well okay thank you thank you all for addressing that question I think that's a question that comes up a lot when thinking about waste but through the biological and thermo chemical processes of waste energy technologies a lot of these pathogens can be reduced and with the filtration methods and emissions filtration and handling of toxic metals in the incineration process I think a lot of these worries can be reduced just as long as there are those the uh the following of the international standards and use of the technologies that do so in the incineration process okay now uh unless we we don't have any more handraisers and I did see that Solomon wrote his his question here and it's and it's one that has come up a few times is around the capacity building of the end users of the technology and I think in the case of a centralized waste energy facility it's it's less of a concern but with a decentralized approach of utilizing waste energy you are the technology that's being developed and utilized directly interfaces with the customer so what types of capacity building techniques and approaches can be deployed to help overcome that barrier of the interfacing of a of a customer with with the technology itself Tom just adding to his question though I mean I think it's important that and I think this is what waste energy really gives us an opportunity to see is that we really do need to be conscious about the amount of waste that's being produced and so I don't think it's good enough to say produce as much garbage as you want and then we'll take it I think the other point that was really well taken I think is that we all need to think about how we can reduce waste in general so I think in that that um that that first part of his question is is really important in terms of uh in terms of customer interface I think um honestly this is not a very hard question and it's not a very hard concept to visualize we actually find that um you know I feel like I can explain the anaerobic digestion to illiterate farmers that have not gone to school almost better than to academics and people that want to over complicate a lot of these these types of technologies all we're really doing is repeating the the natural cycle of which there really aren't waste streams and and so I think it's important that we realize that humans are really the only ones that produce a waste that's not in balance with the ecosystem that they're working in so I think the the concept's really not that hard and and if you can really show benefits to people so creating policy that directly benefits them and giving them a very good way to to interface with that policy for example in Mexico City um source separation and in many cities around the world source separation of organics is something that's gotten a lot of momentum especially when people can see the benefits um either in cost or or um in an environmental benefit so I think honestly this is a message that really people respond very well to and so I think um it's only about getting the word out there it's not necessarily a massive challenge of helping people understand very complex concepts it's about getting people bought in so that there's the the political will to do these things. Yosa I'd be really interested to hear your perspective in the collection portion of your business as well do you see that that initiative of source separation and the collection of those of those different streams that you bring into your plans how would you see the the mindset and the capacity of of those sectors that you're working in? Yes so it's a lot of times about the incentive so for example the market queens we work with we've done some training with them like what are digestible products and what are not but also gives them a direct interest that they have less nuisance around because their place is more clean it attracts less rodents so that's a direct benefit for them as well so further different because we have the largest system like our waste producers uh are in general not at our site itself I can imagine that in in alex systems people can see directly the changes if they would throw in I don't know a gallon of of gasoline the system would break down and they see the the downsides of it since we had the largest site that that becomes a bit more of risk so we have somebody with the the whole day checking the sources are they clean do we see any contaminations then he goes back to the to the people who are supplying and see how we can solve that so that there's the training component of the people who supply it is quite large in our system let's talk for you um so we'll say uh waste to energy will actually lead to some long-term problems if you don't encourage recycling which is a good point you're talking about uh because you'll find um you'll end up burning most of the waste and recycling man and this will encourage more waste production um but uh like the waste uh the project in in Ethiopia is actually unique because they are able to sort uh waste for recycling maybe this is not their main agenda but um it is actually a plus because they they help to avoid this problem that will motivate people to uh encourage people to come up with uh produce more waste you know for for the unit for energy generation yeah great thanks thanks to you all for for shining some light on that topic I think it's an important one to reduce our waste that we're producing and to be more efficient in the ways that we can we can separate the streams of waste that can be used in different ways we do have a few more minutes left and I think we we have covered the questions in the chat and the the people that have had uh had questions by raising their hands Yana unless you see something else I would just end with with one final question to the participants go for it okay great this is it's more of a left field question in that I'm just curious what what you guys are most excited about if you had the freedom of the world in your hands to work on a waste energy project what is the most what's the thing that's exciting you the most where would you spend your energy if you could if you could devote all your energy to that that one topic what would you do that's the most that you see is the most impactful the most forward thinking the most leading edge technology or effort that you could engage in Tom from Martheid I'm really excited on the opportunity to better link agricultural markets as energy productive producers and as nutrient recyclers so I think the opportunity for real resurgence in rural areas as they can diversify their agricultural businesses and become net energy producers net fertilizer producers and and really allowing um uh in our case small farmers to kind of be the leaders as we transition to clean energy and as we think about how we start developing um agricultural and forest lands as carbon sinks I think um waste energy is is a fundamental piece of that and and so I'm really just excited about seeing seeing scale in the work that we're doing and seeing how instead of working with 30 thousand people today we can be working with 30 million people um as soon as possible because you know I think the the future that we can build using really simple technology and empowering people um is is really exciting um for me the opportunities I would like to see in this is the 60 percent of people in Kenya and and in sub-saharan Africa are not connected to electricity actually having electricity in their houses and we have a 30 about a 30 hectares uh dam site in Kenya called Dandora. I'd also like to see this uh being converted to a waste to energy plant like has been done in Ethiopia and there are hopes for this because the Ethiopian one is the first phase so we hope uh in Nairobi lots will be selected among uh the second or the third phase and this will actually be a big achievement towards the realization of um achieving the development agenda in sub-saharan Africa. Thank you. Yes, thanks so um yeah for me I think it's not not purely a technical solution but for me what drives me is is training and capacity building and giving opportunities to people in in the local areas where we work and uh see them grow so that that would be my focus you can we have several examples in our company with people who are for several years with us who really have made a lot of steps which is really an energizing energy for me to see that happen. Tom, to you. You cut off there at the end did you pose the question back to me? Yes, I said uh back to you again. Okay, it's fantastic. Well uh thank we have run out of time here I would say that I'm excited about the the future of of converting organic biomass into energy and continuing that growth path forward and really bringing the impacts of of waste to energy to the people that really do need it the most those in rural areas small holder farmers that have access to those resources that need the the uh the introduction of a technology that will bring the technology and the system around that technology the the team to do it the the support staff the after-sales service the finances and business model of an integrated offering that can really achieve uh livelihood improvement I think that's that's a significant uh piece of of work that excites me and I think waste energy has a has a big role to play in improving livelihoods uh in in rural areas of of Africa so thank you all for for joining the the virtual salon I'll I'll leave it to Iyana to to wrap it up and I'm really excited uh within the sector and looking forward to future discussion. Thank you Tom for fantastic moderation I I can only echo your enthusiasm uh because I think um this is a really promising and and growing sector for all of you who have joined us I'd like to thank you for attending today's virtual salon I we will be sharing the recording with all of you so if you've missed anything not to worry we will get you will get to afterwards I'd also like to thank all of you who participated in the chat portion there's some really great comments really insightful points that have been raised there stay tuned for our next virtual salon we will be doing this as a series I'd like to thank you ourEEE for uh working with us on on this exciting initiative and if you have any questions or would like to suggest additional topics for the future and speakers please do send us an email at webinars at engineeringforchange.org we also like to encourage you all to become E4C members to get information of upcoming webinars as well as virtual salons and with that I'll leave you all to say have a fantastic afternoon or evening and we will catch you on the next session. Bye-bye!