The Community Cooker is a remarkable recycling project currently operating in Nairobi’s largest slum, Kibera. The cooker turns rubbish into energy for cooking, baking and boiling water. It has two complimentary functions; to address sanitation, health and esthetic issues associated with the growing mounds of rubbish in informal settlements, and to provide communities with alternatives to charcoal, firewood and paraffin for cooking meals and boiling water. The Community Cooker has the potential to transform informal settlements and rural villages into resource rich communities.
The idea evolved from the determination of Nairobi‐born Architect, Jim Archer. Archer, the Chairman of Planning System Services Ltd (PLANNING), was eager to address the massive accumulation of rubbish throughout Africa, while at the same time mitigating deforestation and reducing ground water pollution.
The Community Cooker is a simple machine and can be built anywhere. The cooker itself is made of welded steel insulated with fire bricks around four sides. The top of the cooker consists of a metal plate, and serves as the cooking surface. The cooker has two ovens for baking located underneath the metal plate. A chimney carries the smoke from the combustion chamber to the chimneys outlet high above the neighbourhood’s roofline. Because the stove burns rubbish at over 800 degrees Celsius, it achieves complete combustion1, producing smoke that is white in colour and almost odourless. At the bottom of the stove there is a wide metal chute that allows rubbish to be pushed from the trash storage racks into the combustion chamber of the stove. The rubbish is manually fed by the stove operator, according to the level of heat required for cooking a given dish. The Community Cooker is designed with locally available materials so that repairs, maintenance and operation can easily be carried out by member of the local community.
The cookers basic principle is simple yet powerful: to responsibly collect and burn rubbish in order to generate heat that can be used for cooking, baking, boiling water and other industrial purposes. PLANNING currently has one Community Cooker prototype operating in Laini Saba, Kibera, while a second prototype with improved efficiency is under design. Operation of the Laini Saba Community Cooker is managed by the organization Ushirika wa Usafi, who are located in Kibera, Nairobi. Outreach, education and legal support for the Community Cooker is managed by the Community Cooker Foundation.
The Community Cooker represents a simple, low cost technology with a socially inclusive vision for change; engaging communities to participate in collecting rubbish to exchange for energy to cook food and heat water. Once set up, the cooker can operate for up to 24hrs a day with minimal running cost. While the Community Cooker is currently designed for cooking and boiling water, there is future potential to use the energy produced for alternative income generating activities such as brick and pottery baking, aluminum smelting or water distillation.
