Garbage-Burning Oven Helps Clean Up and Power Kenyan Slum
by Eliza Barclay, Washington, D.C. 
on 11. 1.07
The Christian Science Monitor has a piece out of Nairobi on a garbage-burning oven in the notorious slum of Kibera that aims to preserve the country's forests, which are swiftly being cleared to provide wood and charcoal for cooking, while finding a way to utilize trash for energy. If successful, Monitor says, the pilot project could be a model for megacities and the waste they create.
The oven has a superheated steel plate inside an incinerator box to vaporize drops of water. The oxygen released then helps burn discarded "sump" oil from vehicles – a pollutant in the slums – pushing up the temperature. The target is for the cooker to consume half a ton of waste every day once it has finished trials in about a month.
The project is the first of its kind, according to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), which provided $10,000 for the launch.
"We have already seen a difference in the area we are targeting," says Pauline Nyota, of the Umande Trust, a group that works in slums to improve sanitation and leads the project. "The drainage ditches are much cleaner – just wastewater when before they were clogged with rubbish." Photo credit: Christian Science Monitor ::Via The Christian Science Monitor
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