Haze of Hardship Photograph by Lisa Wiltse One of the common methods for making charcoal in urban slums is to stack wood in a pit, cover it with moist soil, and then burn the wood slowly for several days as it dries out and decomposes to form charcoal. Using well-dried wood is more efficient, but many charcoal-makers use green wood or whatever they can scavenge. Carbonized wood often is mixed with a starch or binding agent such as cassava and formed into the shape of a doughnut, stick, or rod. Charcoal can be burned in a stove or under rocks in a pot. "The big picture is that wood is mostly consumed in rural areas, and charcoal is mostly consumed in urban areas," Chaix said. "That's because (charcoal) is easy to transport, easy to store, stable, abundant." Traditional charcoal-making, Chaix said, has significant environmental impacts because of the large amount of wood required to make charcoal briquettes. Even brick kilns will yield only about 1 ton of charcoal per 4.5 tons of well-dried wood, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). To be carbon-neutral, tree regrowth rates must offset harvesting rates. In many parts of the world, that is not happening. From a health standpoint, charcoal actually is better for cooking and heating than wood, which produces more toxic emissions. In fact, breathing the smoke from inefficient wood-burning stoves contributes to an estimated 1.9 million premature deaths every year—more than double the global death toll of malaria, according to World Health Organization statistics. In the Philippines and throughout Southeast Asia, charcoal, wood and other biomass materials are important energy sources not only for cooking and heating, but traditional industries such as coconut-processing, brick-making, and smoking fish and meat. |
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Scratching Out A Living Photograph by Hannah Reyes, European Pressphoto Agency Manila has more than 11 million inhabitants; one-third to one-half of them live in slums. "Studies show that slum poverty puts major stress on people's lives through pollution, congestion, noise, stagnant water, and flooding," Marife Ballesteros, a research fellow at the Philippine Institute for Development Studies, wrote in a report in 2010. The report was funded by the Asian Development Bank for the government of the Philippines. Charcoal-making communities represent a small percentage of the urban slum population, Ballesteros said by email. However, she said, air pollution from these activities is a significant problem, and violates the Philippines' Clean Air Act. She said she believes the government should help finance cleaner technologies. Experts say charcoal production can be greenhouse gas-neutral or even positive, if biomass is harvested in a sustainable way and burned using cleaner-energy technologies. But policy makers often see charcoal as the lowest form of fuel—a dirty fuel—and an inconvenient problem that falls under multiple jurisdictions and "better to be swept under the rug," said Jean Kim Chaix, founder of The Charcoal Project. The New York-based nonprofit helps design and fund energy efficient solutions for communities relying on charcoal, wood and other biomass fuels for cooking and heating. The group is involved in a project in Uganda, and is planning additional pilot projects including one in Virunga National Park. "Policy makers haven't seen the potential of charcoal," Chaix said. But he hopes that will change, citing some moderately successful pilot projects around the world to create briquettes out of paper, sawdust, and agricultural residues. Smudged Up, Soaped Down Photograph by Lisa Wiltse A girl washes the soot and charcoal off her body after a day's work in the charcoal pits. Project PEARLS is trying to help keep children in school, and improve the living conditions in the Ulingan community. The U.S.-based nonprofit is paying the school expenses of more than 60 elementary-school and 40 nursery and kindergarten children in Ulingan, and hopes to expand that to older school children. The group also delivers hot meals every Saturday morning to more than 100 children and elderly residents, and has built a day-care and learning center to replace a makeshift plywood structure perched above a polluted body of water. "Our ultimate goal is to eradicate child labor in Ulingan," said founder Melissa Villa, noting that children start working "as soon as they can walk" picking up nails from the burned wood. Villa was born and raised in the Philippines before moving to the United States more than 20 years ago. She grew up only about 30 minutes from Ulingan, which means "Charcoal City" in Tagalog. "I had grown up seeing those squatter areas, but I had never seen anything like that," Villa said of her first visit in 2010 with a photojournalist. "No electricity, no toilets, no sanitation. It's right on top of a garbage dump site." Only the acrid smoke of burning charcoal masked the strong smell of garbage, she said. "I was overcome with grief, I knew I needed to help these kids and help these communities." Her project now is about 18 months old, and growing. It relies largely on donations by businesses and individuals in the U.S. and Philippines. "The children of Ulingan suffer from a host of respiratory illnesses as well as skin diseases due to living near the charcoal factories in the midst of the dumpsite," Villa said. Volunteer nurses and doctors recruited by Project PEARLS visit the site every three months. |
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Ashes to Ashes Photograph by Michael Coyne, Corbis Women and children living in this squatter community of Manila sift through the ashes for nails, old hinges and wire that they sell for scrap. Charcoal is sustainably produced in some areas but not everywhere, according to Jeremy Broadhead, a forester who does work for the FAO's Asia and the Pacific regional office. "For example, charcoal is sustainably produced in Matang mangroves in Malaysia but in many parts of Myanmar, mangroves are being degraded through overconsumption and lack of availability of alternative sources of energy," Broadhead said by email. In particular, commercial charcoal production threatens forest resources, he said, and needs to be controlled through regulation and better management including the production of wood to offset charcoal production. Modern kilns can make charcoal production more efficient, but the initial investment may be too much for local producers, Broadhead said. Also, "it is possible that distributing high-efficiency equipment could increase profits and cause degradation of forest resources where wood sources are not sustainably managed." Published January 25, 2012 |
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Sifting Through Rubble Photograph by Lisa Wiltse Young children work without masks or gloves, and sometimes they are not even wearing shoes as they sift through charcoal in search of nails to sell at the junkyard. At the end of the day, some jump into the polluted bay to wash off the grime. Many charcoal-making families in the Ulingan squatter community in Tondo earn just 70 pesos a day, or $1.60, well below the Philippines' minimum wage rate of approximately 400 pesos, or $9 a day. The children collecting the nails may make only the equivalent of 25 to 40 cents in pesos. In some cases, families earn just enough to buy a kilogram of poor-quality rice and "pagpag"—fast-food leftovers picked out of dumpsters or rubbish piles. Pagpag in Tagalog means "shake off," as in shaking the debris off the discarded food. Some charcoal-makers in the Manila slums reportedly borrow money from loan sharks at staggering interest rates just to buy raw timber. Generally, though, the urban poor are resourceful in scavenging wood from garbage dumps and demolished construction sites. In Southeast Asia overall, about 10 to 50 percent of wood fuel comes from forests, with the remainder coming from construction scrap, dead wood, stumps, and other non-forest sources, according to FAO. |
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No Birthdays Photograph by Hartmut Schwarzbach This soot-covered girl was six years old when the photo was taken, but she didn't know her exact birthday, according to photographer Hartmut Schwarzbach of Argus Fotoarchiv. She had yet to go to school, and instead was searching for scrap metal to help her family. They live near an area where tires are being burned. Project PEARLS started a program in the Ulingan community to celebrate children's birthdays with cake and candles, ice cream, and noodles (for long life), and gifts and songs. "For most of our children in Ulingan, their birthdays come and go without celebrating or even knowing it," Villa said. The Ulingans have lived in the area illegally for 15 years. They have been getting government eviction notices, but resettlement sites are "in faraway provinces and they don't want to move," Villa said. The charcoal factories are considered illegal, in violation of the Philippines' Clean Air Act. But Villa said the squatters have reached an agreement with government officials to stay for three years as long as they replace the charcoal pits with cleaner energy kilns that burn coconut husks. But the community figures it will need to raise enough money to buy 10 kilns, each at a cost of 75,000 to 100,000 pesos ($1,700 to $2,265). Ballesteros said she believes the government should help charcoal-makers with the facilities needed to decrease air pollution and improve sanitation in the area. Local governments can finance this through countrywide development funds, she said. "The government should support this livelihood program in the same way that basket-making and other recycling activities are given support," she said by email. Chaix said he believes there are opportunities to produce briquettes in urban slums from biomass materials, but that a business plan would be needed for each community. "If you're going to produce briquettes you have to make sure they are designed to be used in what local people are cooking," Chaix said. "You have to make a product that's cheaper and as good as what they are using," he added. "You want to create an incentive for them to switch and that's a tough nut to crack. There's not a one-size-fits-all formula." |
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