Manufacturing biochar, a carbon offshoot of slow-burned wood, is being proposed to solve slash and forestry debris.
That debris problem has devastated the East Coast during extreme weather and prompted a ministerial inquiry. But biochar may yet turn a problem into a profit.
Hurricane Gabrielle spread slash and silt throughout the East Coast in January.
It’s pretty bad if you just go to the beach and have a look, there’s slash everywhere,” Slash for Cash project development manager and facilitator Mātene Maraki says, “It’s bad for our moana, it’s bad for our rivers, our awa.”
In March, cultural environmental ecologist Thabiso Mashaba from Botswana arrived on an Edmund Hillary fellowship to help residents find solutions to heal the land and turn slash into cash.
“The process is called carbonisation. It’s the cousin to something known as pyrolysis, Pyrolysis uses high heat. Ours uses low heat and it’s basically an environmentally friendly way of taking dead carbon matter, and you are basically putting this into a bucket, burning it and, as you are burning it, all of the poisonous gases that are supposed to go into the atmosphere get broken down inside this bucket … and after all the moisture has been omitted, what will remain in that small bucket is what we call charcoal or what people normally call biochar,” Mashaba says.
43 people trained so far
He says the charcoal is then activated using animal manure, which makes it a nutrient-rich fertiliser for the soil, a traditional practice in his homeland of Botswana.
“These nutrients that are living in there will start getting excited as they get into the soil, and as they emit discretion of some sort, these are the nutrients that get into the soil. So that is what we are offering to Tairāwhiti to consider and explore with us in healing the land,” Mashaba says.
Mashaba and Maraki have trained more than 40 people in Tolaga Bay, Ruatōria and Wairoa to make biochar through the Eastern Institute of Technology.
“I know unemployment all over the East Coast and throughout Aotearoa is bad. There’s a lot of unemployment here, and it’s just good to create a job for them if that’s what it will take for someone to come up with some employment, and I think slash for cash will do it for everyone,” Maraki says.
Mashaba and Maraki are seeking both financial and non-financial assistance to help the Slash for Cash project flourish.