The Art of Making a Briquette

There’s an art to making biomass briquettes, the low-cost environmentally friendly, cooking-fuel alternative to traditional charcoal and firewood.

Everybody will tell you that the critical part of briquette making is early in the process, in the careful selection of the material and a fine tuning of the product mix to make the mash that, once pressed and dried, will become the briquette. This organic material - including any number of scrap wastes, such as tree leaves, banana peels, and cereal husks - is sorted and left to dry and ferment in the sun and heat.

In parallel, by mixing scrap paper and water one can start preparing the mash.

Once the materials are dry and pounded vigorously, they are incorporated in the mash together with charcoal dust and fines and sawdust.

Then, by filling a set of molds with the mash, pressing the molds with a device (here a Mini-Bryant press) to drain the water out, you get two beautiful briquettes.

 

The briquettes are still very wet and are dried further on tarps or a drying rack for 3 to 4 days, until...

...it's cooking time.

We thank Legacy Foundation, which has been promoting the use of briquettes, training producers, and research technological improvements worldwide for over two decades.