Knud Tybirk
Ph.D., Senior Innovation Manager, Responsible for Communication in Bio4Africa
Food & Biocluster
Denmark
kt@foodbiocluster.dk
Successful transfer of technologies between the EU and Africa is possible and it benefits all, as it supports the environment by converting agricultural waste into valuable resources and promoting sustainable growth in the bioeconomy.
New technologies often take a long journey from idea to market, especially when transferring technology from Europe to Africa, which may take many years.
However, in Bio4Africa (www.bio4africa.eu), a four-year EU Horizon Research and Innovation Action project, we have adapted two young bioeconomy technologies to local conditions and transferred them to four African countries.
These two technologies also have implications for carbon and nutrient recycling – especially on the African continent – and are examples of a new way of thinking about bioeconomy and indeed a way to ensure optimal use of biogenic carbon in the agricultural ecosystem.
Agricultural waste biomass pyrolysis
In Europe, pyrolysis of waste biomasses has recently been introduced to produce biochar as carbon storage in agricultural soils, helping to counteract Green House Gas emissions. Many millions of euros have been invested in developing these technologies for large-scale and high-tech applications – and often coupled directly with biogas production and the circular nutrient handling in the bioeconomy.
In the project Bio4Africa, we have introduced a Brazilian pyrolysis kiln technology and demonstrated the usefulness of this technology on waste agricultural biomasses. It is cheap (costs around 5000 € and is easy to build for locals with a construction manual) and yet much better than traditional pyrolysis technology.
This pyrolysis process, using agricultural waste such as mango stones, coconut shells, corn cobs, cashew nut shells etc., has several purposes:
1) to avoid deforestation and make agricultural waste biochar available to replace woody biochar
2) to make value out of large piles of biomass waste.
The biochar can be used – depending on the local needs and value optimization –
- either as a soil amendment to increase the productivity of acidic, leached soils (tested in combination with traditional fertilizers for maize, okra and tomatoes) or
- to produce briquettes of waste biochar for local cooking (either directly or transformed into briquettes).
- to use the activated biochar for purifying drinking water in villages
Figure 1 Newly constructed Brazilian kiln with four chambers and common chimney and resulting corn cob biochar in Loagri, Ghana
Green protein refinement
Another promising concept and technology successfully implemented in Uganda and Ghana is the collection and processing of green leaves (grasses, legumes and combinations of these) through a robust and simplified ‘slow juicer’.
The technology used in the projects has been brought in from elsewhere, but it is not very complex. Grassa BV, a company based in the Netherlands, has marketed this product to European dairy farmers, and it is now being tested and implemented in Uganda and Ghana.
The idea is to produce multiple value streams from grass and/or legume leaves:
1. The press cake contains crushed leaf cells with highly digestible proteins as valuable fodder for ruminants – either fresh or ensiled for later use. Even if much protein has been separated into the juice, the press cake still has a high fodder value. The manure nutrients (especially P and K) can be recirculated into the grass/legume fields.
2. Lactic acid bacteria are added to the juice to make coagulated proteins and a whey containing most sugars and minerals.
3. The coagulated proteins are separated and dried by sun or air and can be used in fodder mixtures for poultry, pigs, rabbits and fish, thus making local green proteins valuable for more livestock species.
4. The brown juice can be further refined (we are testing several interesting high-value ingredients in Bio4Africa), the juice can be fed to pigs or into a biogas digester or can be used directly as a fertilizer (containing P and K) in the fields, where the green plants were harvested.
The first African installation of a protein refining plant was installed in Uganda in 2023, only a few years after similar plants were commercially launched in Europe. Green protein refinement has great potential to improve local nitrogen recycling system and create additional value streams for villages and cooperatives.
Figure 2 Protein refinery in Fort Portal, Uganda. Left washing of leaves, right tanks for protein coagulation and whey
Innovation transfer
These two examples demonstrate that African countries can innovate, adapt and apply technologies and concepts as intermediates between the more efficient, costly and advanced pyrolysis and biorefinery plants of Northern Europe and the needs of local communities dominated by smallholder farmers.
Apart from the technologies themselves, the investment, ownership and thus, the business model for these technologies should be adopted by the local communities or cooperatives.
We believe that this mutual inspiration can result in better nutrient handling, increased value creation and therefore better livelihood for farming communities in Africa.