Circular waste recycling

Aart van den Beukel: ‘I had never been to Ghana before I started Safisana twelve years ago. I was planning to set up a circular enterprise before I got the idea of doing something in Africa. Entrepreneurship was my priority; the good cause came later. For ten years I had a bagel and espresso bar in Amsterdam. Then I joined Ecofys, a start-up focussed on sustainable energy. That’s where I learned about biogas. We wanted to come up with ways to use biogas, which is released by fermenting waste, to aid families in rural parts of Asia.’

‘The 2008 financial crisis threw a spanner in the works of that project, but the biogas idea stuck. During my search for new investors, I came across people who were working on a concept for recycling human waste from African slums to make biogas. Waste processing is a big problem in Africa. The overcrowded cities lack good sewerage and sanitary facilities. This causes environmental pollution and contributes to the spread of diseases. The idea was to use the income from the biogas to finance the processing of residual waste streams. I was asked to execute this recycling concept as a business in Africa. Rabobank and engineering HaskoningDHV were willing to invest.’

‘I gave myself two years to see if the plan was viable. Then I set up Safisana. We chose Ghana because it’s a safe country without too much corruption. First, I went to the Ghanaian capital Accra. I immediately hired a competent guy who could step in as manager in my place, because I was going to commute back and forth from the Netherlands.

We found a suitable site for the project in the suburb of Ashaiman. We thought a pilot plant was the best way to show the locals how the circular economy waste recycling concept works. On this site we built a public toilet and a mini factory that ran on human excreta. Once it was built, we organised an opening ceremony with the district ‘mayor’ and the Dutch ambassador. We fried a local dish using biogas we’d generated. The people who’d come to watch reacted exuberantly with lots of laughter and whooping. They found it very funny that they were having this meal thanks to their poo.’

‘We had already made the locals enthusiastic. This was essential, as the Ghanaians are quite wary of Westerners with all their promises and development projects. I then went and calculated how much it would cost to build a large-scale factory. To ensure adequate supply we’d need a lorry to drive human waste from another neighbourhood. What would that cost? How much biogas would we need to generate and convert into electricity to sell as kilowatts per hour to the energy company? How much organic fertiliser would we need to produce to cover our costs? In 2013 I went to the African Development Bank with my business plan. Together with the money I got from the Dutch government, I raised a total of 2.5 million. This was enough for us to finance the factory. But acquiring the necessary permits went at a snail’s pace. It drove me crazy. The factory was finally built in 2017.’

‘We are now funded by a permanent group of investors, including the Sint Antonius Stichting. They help us roll out our business model in other countries. Our primary goal is to contribute to the health of people in poor, over-populated communities. But you need many more Safisana factories to do that. We are doubling our capacity in Accra. And we are building a second factory in the city of Kumasi. I’ve noticed that it is much easier now than at the start of the Accra project. Safisana has put sustainable waste processing on the map in Ghana. The Russia-Ukraine war has provoked a shortage of synthetic fertilisers in Ghana; our organic fertiliser provides an alternative. In the meantime, I have had three children. We have considered as a family to go and live in Ghana, but it’s best if Ghanaians run the factory. When I’m there, everyone looks to me as director to make decisions. Our employees need the confidence to do it themselves. And that will only happen if we give them that confidence.’