Dschang's composting platform (Cameroon)

Located in the heart of the Bamiléké country, which is well known for its intensive market gardening agriculture, the composting unit established by ERA Cameroon and by the Mayor’s office of Dschang will soon be expanding.

The Environmental Research Action Association in Cameroon (ERA- Cameroun) has started a waste composting pilot project in January 2010 in the city of Dschang, with a financing from FFEM PPI, and in partnership with CEFREPADE and the Dschang City Council.

This Council has 220,000 inhabitants, almost 80,000 of which are within the urban sector faced with a major problem of urban household waste management. Thus, the relevance of a composting activity is highly significant given the high content of fermentable substances in the waste and the existence of a major local agricultural activity.

ERA has therefore developed three main activities:

The pre-collection of waste in the district of Ngui;
The centralised composting of the collected waste in this district with the incorporation of trade waste.
The support to the construction of individual composting units in several districts and villages of the Dschang Council

These activities derive from conversations held since 2007 with the city of Dschang about the management of the municipal waste. This project is being developed along with another waste management project, led by the Elans Association focussed more particularly on improving collection.

In order to evaluate the potential in the composting process’s recovery of the emissions of greenhouse effect gases, CEFREPADE has contacted ERA and Gevalor, whose President made a visit to Dschang in July 2010.

The work of pre-collecting and of sorting and composting is carried out by a team of four composting specialists managed by a team leader. An engineer, who is the project leader and a person responsible for marketing and publicity complete the team.

The pre-collection is carried out using a collection van door-to-door in the district. The pre-collection is made five days a week, on average every other day in each household. This service, which is supported by the Mayor’s Office, has enabled the shutting down of six uncontrolled waste dumps (out of seven) in the Ngui district.

On average 1.56t of waste per day processed by the Ngui composting unit have been during 2011, equivalent to a capacity of 400t per year. One of the constraints to the expansion of the activities comes from the difficulties that the council is currently encountering in financing the collection and the delivery of the waste to the composting unit.