Charcoal Literature Review

Chapter 2
Review of Related Literature

Nowadays, the charcoal industries have been doing innovations to improve their products, aiming to deliver more to their consumers while finding the balance to be ecological friendly. In 2011,The Good One, a major producer of charcoal in the United States had introduced different variations in their products: flavored charcoal, organic charcoal and briquettes. Flavored charcoals emit aromatic smoke when used, hence, adding flavor to the food being grilled. Organic charcoal comes from sawdust, wood chips, chopped tree trunks, leaves and any biomass for that matter where they were dried and cooked in a kiln. Briquettes on the other hand were from volcanic ashes or sawdust mixed with a binding material

Briquetting on the other hand though could be messy, is a much safer way of making charcoal and can be a backyard industry. A briquette is a block of compressed coal dust, charcoal dust, sawdust, wood chips or biomass, and is used as a fuel in stoves and boilers (FAO, 2011). Charcoal is not like clay. Charcoal is a material without plasticity and can not be mold into shape without adding a binding material. To form charcoal dust into briquettes, an agglomerating material is added to the charcoal dust and then pressure is applied to the mixture to form a briquette. (Ngureco, 2012) Briquettes are made up of ingredients grouped into heat fuel source, wick, binder and fillers. The heat fuel source provides the energy. The higher the percentage of heat fuel materials, the better the briquette. Literature suggests getting about 90% of heat fuel material for good briquettes that will give you more fire. (Science Daily,

Any starch will do but preferably from cassava. Cassava starch is preferred because cassava tuber and chips are very cheap, the tubers are as good as starch due to high starch content, cassava is easily available to the low income societies, and that the societies still consider cassava as a poor man’s food only lying idle in farms waiting to be used just in case there is drought and food shortage. (Zeier, 1987)
Corn starch (maize starch), wheat starch, maize flour, wheat flour and potatoes starch can also be used. These are foods and it can be difficult to make sense to a poor man that what he may consider as a delicacy should be used by him to make charcoal briquettes. (Huang, 2014)
Another good binder is gum Arabic or acacia gum which is harvested from acacia tree. Acacia tree is very common in semi arid areas especially in Africa Sahel and in particular Senegal, Sudan, Somalia, etc. A kilogram of high quality gum Arabic is costing $2 ex-works in Kenya. If you are to use 5% gum Arabic for your charcoal briquettes, then, this is not cheap either. Mashed newsprint/waste paper pulp is also a good binder. Other bidders such molasses, cement, clay and tar can be used but the resulting briquettes are not the best. (Author Unknown,