Eco-charcoal briquettes made from palm nut shells are giving households in Porto-Novo, Benin, a cleaner, circular alternative to traditional wood charcoal.
Eco-charcoal briquettes are changing how families cook in Porto-Novo, Benin. A local group called Gbobètô makes them from waste nobody wanted before. These eco-charcoal briquettes give both farmers and households a new source of value from old agricultural leftovers.
Workers carbonize palm nut shells, a byproduct of palm oil production. They mix the shells with cassava starch and rice husks to bind the fuel together.
The raw material comes from five farming cooperatives in the Ouémé Valley and Kétou. Palm oil producers supply the carbonized shells, while cassava farmers supply the starch. Staff sort each batch by hand first. Shells that are not fully carbonized get pulled out, since they create smoke and odor.
The sorted shells then go through a grinder. Workers blend the ground shells with starch, then compress the mixture into briquettes using an extruder.
Naomi Fagla Medegan founded Gbobètô in France in October 2018. She launched operations in Porto-Novo, her grandfather’s hometown, in May 2019. Her work later earned wider recognition. In 2021, she won the Terre de Femmes France award and a humanitarian trophy honoring French expatriates abroad.
Benin’s government waste agency has also formally recognized Gbobètô’s approach. Outside funding has followed too, with more than 600,000 euros raised over three years to support the young organization.
The project grew from three problems at once. Urban waste was piling up, and wood charcoal supplies were shrinking fast. Smoke from open cooking fires was also harming public health. Nearly 95 percent of Beninese households still cook with wood charcoal.
Benin ranked among Africa’s most deforested countries in a 2019 Greenpeace assessment. Palm shells offered an obvious alternative to that shrinking wood supply.
Benin produces hundreds of thousands of tons of palm shells each year. Yet only 2 to 3 percent gets reused for fuel today. Gbobètô spent five years testing other materials first, including corn cobs and rice hulls alone. The palm shell and starch combination eventually matched the heat output of traditional wood charcoal.
The eco-charcoal briquettes made by Gbobètô also burn 15 to 25 minutes longer per batch than regular charcoal. A kilogram of the briquettes costs the same as roughly 700 grams of traditional charcoal.
That difference is easy to miss by eye but adds up at scale. Early estimates suggest switching to the briquettes can cut a household’s cooking fuel costs by 20-40%. Gbobètô packages the briquettes in recycled cement paper sacks collected from local construction sites.
The team deliberately avoided imported machinery. Local technicians build and repair the equipment themselves, which keeps repairs fast and affordable.
That local-tech approach creates jobs beyond the factory floor too. Artisans help build machines, while women and young people find work across collection, production, and sales.
The briquettes are not entirely emission-free, since any solid fuel releases carbon when burned. Their footprint still compares favorably to wood charcoal. They use residue that would otherwise be burned or dumped anyway.
Experts who study circular economy models see real promise in the approach. Turning agricultural leftovers into fuel cuts waste, creates local income, and eases pressure on forests all at once.
Eco-charcoal briquettes demonstrate circular economy principles in action, cutting agricultural waste, creating local income, and reducing deforestation pressure in a single process. Photo courtesy of Gbobètô.
Gbobètô currently produces about 300 kilograms of eco-charcoal briquettes daily. The team aims to double output to one metric ton a day, enough to supply 500 households.
Real barriers remain before that scale is possible. Funding stays limited, and equipment upgrades cost more than the group can easily cover. A full environmental impact study would help attract bigger financial partners. That kind of study remains too costly for now.
Consumer habits present another hurdle. Wood charcoal lights faster, and cheap illegal charcoal still undercuts eco-charcoal prices in local markets.
Retraining traditional charcoal makers could help ease that competition rather than fight it. Many already have deep experience producing and selling fuel. With the right training and equipment, those skills transfer directly to the new supply chain.
Even so, each kilogram of agricultural waste turned into eco-charcoal briquettes represents wood that stays in the forest. Scaled up and paired with supportive public policy, briquettes like these could meaningfully ease pressure on Benin’s shrinking woodlands.
