Recycling when there is no recycling program. Part 2: aluminum cans

Our power was out earlier today, so the alcohol stove came in very useful even in our relatively modern flat. The empty steel food cans are being used just as a tripod for the pot of water. As a disclaimer, the stoves should not be used in an enclosed space indoors, but we had windows open and used the alcohol can right on our stove top.

Due to the long distances between towns and the low overall population density, it is not cost-efficient to implement recycling programs in the far reaches of Namibia. As a Peace Corps Volunteer in Rundu, Kavango East Region, it was difficult to see all of the aluminum cans and other recyclables scattered in trash piles all over town, when there is such economic potential. In my first post on recycling, I highlighted some uses for glass bottles.

As a hiker and backpacker (trekker), I was familiar with alcohol stoves made from aluminum cans, but never tried one until our friend Ryan made one for us as a gift. His stove is featured in the photo above and, as Ryan is an engineer, it is pretty advanced for this genre of stoves. I was looking for a technique to make these can stoves not requiring as many materials or tools and found this great tutorial on YouTube.

Test run of the easy-to-make alcohol stove.

The other nice thing about the stoves in the YouTube video is that the pot can go directly on the stove itself so you don’t need a separate pot stand, but elevating it a bit would probably be more efficient. A windscreen is also definitely recommended for these types of stoves. I’m going to research making a windscreen out of aluminum cans cut into strips as shown below. I’m hoping to run a short course sometime next month at COSDEC to demonstrate how to make these stoves.

Aluminum can cut into a rectangle for potential use.

These can stoves are also great because the fuel is just denatured alcohol or methanol (sold sometimes as HEET), which is available all over the world in hardware stores, grocery stores or pharmacies. The fuel burns cleanly, especially if your stove is well-made and produces nice blue flames.

Here in Namibia, alcohol that can be used in these can stoves is sold as “methylated spirits.”

This Instructables link has an interesting idea to use aluminium can rectangles as roofing shingles. I’m not going to attempt aluminum smelting in my remaining time in Namibia, but I think it would really have potential especially since the molten aluminum can be cast in sand (of which there is plenty here). Here is an example of how to make an aluminum foundry. Here is another good post on how to cast a bowl out of molten aluminum.

Recycling when there is no recycling program. Part 1: bottle cutting

I drafted this post last week, but it makes for a nice Peace Corps Earth Day tie in!

As someone who grew up during the evolution of recycling in the U.S., I am conditioned to try to recycle as much as possible. Where we lived in Denver for instance, they made it ridiculously easy with single-stream recycling in a large wheeled container that was picked up every two weeks. Between that and using our compost pile for fruit and vegetable scraps, we usually had very little actual trash.

A typical trash pile on our school campus. Seeing the waste of this marula fruit last year prompted me to take action. Aluminum cans, glass bottles and plastics are also either buried or burned in trash fires (these materials don’t burn well!)

As a newly minted Peace Corps Volunteer arriving in Rundu, Namibia in September 2013, I had a fast wake up call that developing countries are unable to recycle the vast majority of their trash. The sad thing is that this is a missed opportunity for employment creation and for income-generating opportunities for unskilled workers. There are fluctuations in the market for plastics, glass and paper, but municipal recycling programs are usually sustainable through aluminum can recycling. In the U.S. you can find many otherwise unemployed people collecting cans to sell. One guy even funded a movie just through collecting cans and selling them (but I can’t find a link to that! I gave up after an hour, sorry). Because of the ease of recycling cans, more of my favorite Colorado breweries started producing beer in cans as well. Recycling, especially aluminum, can be profitable.

In the locations (townships) around Rundu, trash pick up is nonexistent, so people dump their trash in open fields and eventually the town comes in with a bulldozer and loads it in a truck destined for the landfill. Early on in my service, I emailed a couple of companies that do recycling in Windhoek and the other larger cities in Namibia to see when a program might be coming to Rundu, but never received a reply (the usual situation when you email someone in Namibia).

I started saving cans and bottles here in our flat, much like a hoarder, because I found it also so wasteful. These materials quickly fill up a trash pit because they don’t burn. When we visited the U.S. last May, I brought back to Namibia a Kinkajou Bottle Cutter.  Basically, the Kinkajou blade makes a score line around the bottle and then cycles of hot and cold water are used to cleanly fracture the glass, so the bottle can then be sanded smooth and used as a glass or a vase, etc.

Nothing is ever as easy as advertised though. In my initial attempts to make small drinking glasses out of empty beer bottles, I was going through at least 10 cycles of hot and cold (even with an ice water bath for the bottles) before I was able to get them to break. This is a lot more time and effort than advertised. I was able to cut a few of these small bottles, but I moved onto other projects a bit disappointed because I was hoping to leave this bottle cutter behind for a Namibian to use to make these products as a business.

Thanks to the work of the Kinkajou Bottle Cutter, our South African wine bottle collection is ready to be put to new uses such as a replacement French press container – the large Four Cousins bottle. They call it a coffee plunger here.

Last month I shifted to attempting to cut wine bottles and had much better success! Maybe the larger surface area allows for better fracturing, but with only two or three cycles of hot and cold water, the wine bottles snapped fairly cleanly. I do recommend the product, just not for Namibian beer bottles. I am going to give the cut wine bottles away as gifts to my colleagues at work and feature this item in my business club as a possible income-generating activity. The bottle labels can be removed using warm water and soap. Soaking them for an hour seems to work pretty well for most of the labels.

An example of a smaller glass made from a juice bottle.

Bottles can also be ‘cut’ using string and nail polish remover although I batted one for three on my attempts using that technique. You don’t need the fancy Kinajou cutter, but it does make it easier. The “cut” wine bottles can be used to display flowers, as storage containers and as pencil and pens cups.

A future post will cover “recycling” of aluminum and steel cans.