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Vale Encantado: A Community-Led Biodigester Project (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)

Vale Encantado: A Community-Led Biodigester Project

Summary

In the heart of a rainforest within the city of Rio de Janeiro, over 100 people live in a favela with no infrastructure or services. One community leader collaborated with an outside biodigester "evangelist" to lead residents in building their own community size bio-digester that provides bio gas generated from organic waste. The biodigester solves sanitation issues by reducing food waste, improves self-reliance by providing free fuel, creates eco-tourism jobs by supplying fuel for a restaurant that serves eco-tourists.

Discussion questions

Are there projects in your community that have been led and maintained entirely by community members?

What might be some advantages of having independently led community projects, with no government involvement?

What might be some disadvantages of having independently led community projects, with no government involvement?

Bio

Otávio Barros, Community Leader, President Residents' Association
Otávio Barros is a fifth-generation resident of the Vale Encantado community (an informal settlement within the Tijuca Forest in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) and president of the Vale Encantado Residents’ Association. He launched the community’s sustainable tourism project in 2005 and has grown the project into a cooperative that leads hikes and tours in the forest and offers unique local vegan dishes to their visitors – made mostly of the crops from their own community gardens. Otávio, in collaboration with Solar Cities and with support from local University, led residents in development of a sustainable sewerage system that treats the community’s sewage through an on-site biodigester and natural filtering system. Five homes are currently connected to the system, and a separate biodigester uses food waste to provide biogas to fuel the cooperative kitchen. The community has also has installed solar panels to generate their own energy.

Thomas Henry Culhane, Urban Ecologist
Dr. T.H. Culhane is a professor of Environmental Sustainability and Justice at the Patel College for Global Solutions at University of South Florida, Tampa. He is passionate about transforming food waste into fuel and fertilizer, collecting biogas and bioslurry, to not only cook food, heat water and generate clean electricity, but to grow new nutritious food. Culhane is co-founder and president of Solar CITIES Inc., a not-for-profit environmental technology training organization that teaches members of impoverished urban and rural communities around the world how to build their own home and community scale biodigesters and vertical aeroponics food production systems with the goal of eliminating all waste. Culhane lives with and uses these technologies in his daily life at the Rosebud Continuum Eco-Science and Sustainability Education Center in Land O Lakes Florida where he resides.