No more trees stand around Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, because they have been cut down to make charcoal. The charcoal goes to the city to cook food, creating smoke that pollutes the lungs of mothers and children. The food has to be imported because the land is barren because…the trees are gone.
This could be the beginning of one of those tragic, apocalyptic stories about modern Africa, but it's not; instead, it's the story of a sophisticated international project that wants to regrow the trees, clear the smoke, and make the land productive again. Oh, and make money.
CleanStar Mozambique is a consortium led by a New York venture firm and the Dutch Danish biotech company Novozymes that wants to turn a profit for 2,000 farmers and 1,000 other workers in the supply chain, as well as a long list of partners. If it works, the experiment in this impoverished East African nation may be replicated across Africa. There are so many moving parts and goals that it's a little difficult to explain. But here we go.
Here's a video that explains CleanStar Mozambique's approach.
It starts with a stove. Branded by the name NDZILO, the aluminum device runs not on charcoal but bioethanol. It is designed by the Swedish manufacturer Dometic and will be assembled locally with a citywide rollout planned for late 2012, said Sagun Saxena, a founder of New York firm CleanStar Ventures. The stove is priced at $30. A month's supply of fuel is also $30, about the same price of a month's worth of charcoal.
The biofuel for the stove is being made in a processing plant that will open this summer outside the port city of Beira. The plant was donated by ICM, a Kansas-based maker of ethanol processing plants, and enzymes to catalyze the fuel are supplied by Novozymes.
The biofuel is made from cassava, a starchy root that is a staple of diets across Africa. The cassava is being grown by farmers -- 250 of them so far -- who have entered an agreement with CleanStar Mozambique to produce the root as long as they also agree to follow the rules and grow some other crops.
Those include soybeans, sorghum and nuts, planted in rotation on fields ringed by trees. The combination is intended to rebuild the depleted soil and give the farmer a diverse, year-round supply of crops to be eaten, sold on the open market, or sold to CleanStar to make processed foods.
Now, back to the stove; the cassava-based fuel burns far cleaner than charcoal, which produces the same amount of smoke as two packs of cigarettes a day, according to the World Health Organization. Replacing the blackened wood may lengthen the lives of thousands. The company wants to produce two million liters of biofuel a year -- enough energy to replace 20 percent of the charcoal used in Maputo, said Novozymes CEO Steen Riisgaard.
A final piece of the project is carbon credits, which the consortium plans to sell at an undisclosed price to Bank of America Merrill Lynch. A single stove can earn up to four tons of carbon credits because the plan saves carbon in two ways, Risigaard said. The project replaces smoldering charcoal that produces a lot of CO2 and worsens global warming. It also plants trees that remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
Will do-good capitalism actually make money for its corporate parents?
"If all our projects were like this, we would not be profitable," Riisgaard said with a laugh during an interview. "At this point in time it's not going to move the needle. Sometime in the next five or 10 years, it will be real money."
