Sisal charcoal

Back in Kenya, I lived near an expansive sisal plantation that stretched as far as the eye can see. Sisal (also here) looks like an enormous aloe vera plant only when you crack open the leaves, you find fibers instead of medicine. On large plantations, people harvest these for producing rope and twine. However, in many arid regions, sisal is one of the few plants that can survive, so it is used there as a multi-purpose plant. Its leaves have needles at the end that mean it can effectively be planted as a fence. It also has a nice stalk (I believe it is classified as a tree-like shrub since the stalk is actually rather spongy on the inside) that people use in building structures. And of course, when people are waiting for the rains to come, they may spend their days braiding twine to sell in local shops for a few cents.

A lot of these communities face acute shortages of cooking fuel, so I wanted to work on making sisal charcoal, so on one of my trips to Nadosoito, I grabbed a few leaves to do some experiments. After trying it out, I went back to Nadosoito to work on it with the community. We used old brown leaves, which were incredibly dry as well as a bit of the white spongy material to help get the burn started. I was amazed by how quickly the moisture content vanished, and this wound up being one of the fastest charcoal burns I've ever conducted (I didn't time it, but I think the whole process was over in one hour, compared to the usual 2.5). Still, there's definitely a lot of work still to be done.

1. The charcoal turned out really well, although the starts of the leaves didn't carbonize at all, so I think we just have to cut that part off in the future.
2. Collecting sisal leaves is a rather painful process. You tend to be enmeshed in needles, so my hand started to look rather like a pin cushion. Also, my shin took one more than a quarter inch deep. Next time I'm wearing gardening gloves for this.
3. We couldn't find any useful binding media for producing briquettes. We tried euphorbia milk (euphorbia is also known as the milk tree because when you cut the bark it oozes out a milky liquid), but it didn't stick very well.
4. When we burned the unbriquetted charcoal, it was producing a bit of carbon monoxide. I suspected the clear smoke was dangerous, but without any sort of testing equipment, I opted to breathe in the smoke and when I felt the carbon monoxide effects in my head, I knew we needed a solution to the briquetting issue.

Still, considering how abundant sisal is, this is definitely an exciting development and if we can just find a solution for problem number 3 above, we should have a really cool project.