The Briquette Project

There is (obviously) no central heating in Afghanistan, so every room has one of these wood-burning stoves for heating. This is the stove in the room I shared with my three fabulous roommates at the guesthouse. They pretty much all look like this.


Wood is becoming scarce in Afghanistan, not to mention expensive in a country where the average yearly wage is something like $300. So someone, somewhere came up with the idea and formula for briquettes. Briquettes are round blocks that burn hotter and longer in stoves than anything else. They're cheap and easy to make and the best part is, they're made of waste products and garbage like shells, leaves, plastic, mud, sawdust, etc. Paper is used as a binding agent so it is always a vital ingredient, but everything else varies according to what is available. The organization that runs the guesthouse we stayed at runs a project that not only makes briquettes, which are then sold and are actually the number one source of income for the organization, but also teaches women how to make them and then provides them with the necessary machinery to do it themselves. That way women can make a living for themselves--and a pretty good living for Afghanistan, at that. The guesthouse therefore always had them available and we used them for our stoves at night. As soon as the fire got going with briquettes it would instantly make the room toasty warm and comfy.

When we visited the girls' school, we also visited their briquette vocational training project they run at the school and got to see how the briquettes are made.