Comments by "Gaza is not Amalek" (@Ass_of_Amalek) on "Briquettes Made From Coconut Waste Could Reduce Deforestation | World Wide Waste" video.

Robert Lee yes, if he's actually already got distribution in countries like germany, there probably is real potential for growth because the stuff can sell for a lot more money in those markets than if it competes with charcoal in sierra leone. well, competing with charcoal in sierra leone is the point, but that could also eventually be achieved more effectively if the business makes enough money to optimize and increase production with better machines.
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he's feeding his biological mother, his adoptive family are the ones who got killed in the mudslide.
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Chef also a good oño is a heavy oño
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yes, mostly, but that would be a job for a government. what I see governments needing to do in A LOT of these third world documentaries is to build trash-fired power plants. those are desperately needed. there are poor countries importing trash to extract some value from small parts of it, but then they don't have power plants to burn the rest, and instead they wreck their environment, water quality, fishing industries and tourism possibilities with trash piling and washing up everywhere, and people burn trash in open fires to get rid of it, which releases huge amounts of toxins that could be filtered by a power plant while at the same time it would produce electricity. much of the EU has completely banned household waste from landfils because it's so much better and very practical to just burn just about everything that's not worth recycling or composting. burning trash for electricity doesn't have a good reputation because it has the potential to still release relatively toxic fumes and it doesn't seem as nice as recycling fantasies, but in reality it is the obvious practical solution for most trash problems and infinitely better than what most of the world does with all that stuff!
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Chef if all else fails, he could still dry and char the onions.
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I'll let you finish but first good point
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deforestation for charcoal is a huge problem. in wet regions it causes mudslides and soil degradation that impacts agriculture, in dry regions like the sahel it grows deserts, in settlements it worsens heat, and either way it threatens biodiversity and the climate. of course this small business isn't yet having a big impact, but I do think that there is a lot of potential for growth in using waste biomass to replace wood charcoal. coconut shells are an obvious choice since they're dry and wood-like. there also is the adjacent possibility of using biochar not for burning, but instead to bury it, which improves soil for agriculture because charcoal has favorable air and water retention, and effectively sequesters carbon for hundreds or thousands of years because buried charcoal is quite chemically inert. some of the south american natives did that for hundreds of years (charcoal+shit+pottery shards) and built up a layer of soil known as terra preta that's meters thick in some places and still remarkable for being far more fertile than the natural soil in the region, which in the tropics typically only has a very thin humus layer because the lack of seasons does not produce the intermittent overabundance of decomposing biomass that we get in the fall in temperate climates.
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Agni Das like I said, competing with charcoal in sierra leone is the point, but exporting to germany could perhaps be used transitionally to generate profits to then upgrade the production process to make the product cheaper for the domestic market. they said in the video that as of now it's four times more expensive than local charcoal and basically only the shisha smokers are buying it (presumably because it burns well, and the price doesn't matter as much because they only use small amounts).
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Me Here yeah that would be nice. burying biochar definitely needs external financing, probably from governments. I imagine it would be particularly practical to do it on agricultural fields growing seasonal crops. I guess it might be more effective with organic fertilization (like I said, the standard way to do it would be with dung), but I'm pretty sure it helps with synthetic too. in theory one could first do that for a couple of years and eventually reforest the area with the upgraded soil, but that would have to be an extremely dedicated reforestation effort because at that point it would be an economically unattractive prospect to give up agricultural use of that fertilized soil. though I guess there could be plqces where this would enable the planting of forests that otherwise would not have grown due to previous soil degradation, in which case this order of events could be reasonable. either way, it's deranged that we're talking about very tedious carbon sequestration as a climate solution at the same time as we are digging up gigantic amounts of perfectly sequestered fossil fuels that we wouldn't have to use if we were just a little more serious about the climate. fossil coal is THE BEST carbon sequestration, and the energy we get from burning it is nowhere near what even the best theoretical future sequestration methods would require to put that carbon back in the ground.
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Me Here because some places need more forest than they've got to increase local water retention, decrease soil erosion, and combat desertification and regional climate change.
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Me Here no, biochar does not counteract soil erosion from bad farming practices. you can still ruin or erode soil that has charcoal in it. it's just one good farming practice among others. I never said anything about planting trees in deserts. your idea of burying biochar in exclusively reforestation projects is what seems unreasonable to me. I don't think it's something that you can do much with all at once, it's more for building topsoil layer by lay over years, which fits well with intermittent agricultural use. in most places, LIKE I SAID, you wouldn't want to give up tediously improved soil to then plant a forest, but in certain places this could be one of few viable options to plant a forest at all. one landscape example are tropical areas where forests have been removed by the typical slash and burn method to then use the area for crops for a few years, during which the very thin topsoil degrades until it is no longer viable for agriculture, at which point the farmer clears the next patch of forest and moves on. in particularly bad circumstances, the remaining topsoil then gets washed away, resulting in areas that can't be reforested because they lack the soil that originally supported the forests there. I'm pretty sure this is the case for large areas of south america and the carribbean, and I would guess africa and asia as well.
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