Alhaji Siraj Bah Stated Creating Sustainable Environmental Solutions in Sierra Leone with a $20 Investment

Alhaji Siraj Bah makes eco-friendly products in Sierra Leone.

Alhaji Siraj Bah lost his best friend in a mudslide. Now he’s using coconuts to fight deforestation in West Africa.

The UN named him a “Young Champions of the Earth”

Three days of downpours, heavy for Sierra Leone’s rainy season, had given way to reddish brown muck streaming down the residential slopes of Sugarloaf Mountain. Sinkholes opened. People in this hilly capital reported hearing a crack — like thunder, or a bomb — before the earth collapsed.

Alhaji Siraj Bah, now 22, might have been there that August morning in 2017 if his boss had not put him on the night shift. He might have been sharing a bedroom with his best friend, Abdul, whom he called “brother.” Instead, he was sweeping the floor of a drinking water plant when 1,141 people died or went missing, including Abdul’s family. “All I felt was helpless,” he said, “so I put my attention into finding ways to help.”

Four years later, Bah runs his own business with nearly three dozen employees and an ambitious goal: Reduce the felling of Sierra Leone’s trees — a loss that scientists say amplifies the mudslide risk — by encouraging his neighbors to swap wood-based charcoal for a substitute made from coconut scraps. Heaps of shells and husks discarded by juice sellers around Freetown provide an energy source that requires no chopping.

His enterprise, Rugsal Trading, has now produced roughly 100 tons of coconut briquettes, which, studies show, burn longer for families who do most of their cooking on small outdoor stoves. One report in the Philippines found that a ton of charcoal look-alikes fashioned from natural waste was equivalent to sparing up to 88 trees with 10-centimeter trunks.

“My motivation is: The bigger we grow, the more we can save our trees,” Bah said on a steamy afternoon in the capital, chatting between coconut waste collection stops. “The hardest part is getting the word out about this alternative. Everyone loves charcoal.”

Researchers weren’t sure what triggered the worst natural disaster in the West African country’s history, but some pointed to Sugarloaf mountain’s vanishing greenery. Deforestation not only releases more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — it weakens slopes. Canopies are critical for soaking up rain and taming floods. Roots anchor the soil together.

But Freetown’s mounts were going bald as people collected timber to clear lots for housing and make charcoal, the top cooking fuel in a nation where electricity is often unreliable. Sierra Leone has lost 30 percent of its forest cover over the last two decades, according to Global Forest Watch, an international tracker.

Bah had noticed men in his neighborhood harvesting wood practically every day. Many burned it to produce bags of charcoal. Most people he knew cooked with it.

Growing up, Bah fixated on inventors. His idol was Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive and co-founder of Facebook. When he was ten, according to his mother, he pledged to create the next big thing. His father, a driver, died two years later, and the family ran out of money to take care of Bah and his sister.

So, at 12, he sneaked away from home in his eastern village, hitching a ride to Freetown.

The goal was to make enough money in Freetown to take care of his family back home. But that didn’t happen for a while. Alhaji spent the next four years living on the streets of Freetown, living off earnings from odd jobs he could find. By the fourth year, he got a job as a laborer in a water factory, earning $1 daily. Then he moved in with a friend’s family’s house where the mudslide struck.

Alhaji’s desire for innovation was still alive even though the tragic natural disaster happened. So, he spent a lot of time feeding his curiosity on YouTube with his boss’ computer. He reached his first lightbulb moment. “I researched paper bags and saw that nobody produced them in Freetown. I read about a young entrepreneur in Uganda who started a recycled bag business with $18. I had saved up $20 from my salary. So, I went to the market to buy paper, scissors, and glue and started making bags.”

Selling paper bags wasn’t Alhaji’s ultimate business idea. His endless forays on YouTube had once led him to a video of a man in Indonesia who crafted charcoal replacements from coconut shells. Others were doing something similar in Ghana and Kenya; collecting coconut scraps, drying them out in the sun, grinding them down, charring them in steel drums. Alhaji knew it wasn’t only a great business idea but a way to fight the cause of his adopted family’s death — deforestation.

“Most of the trees deforested in Freetown are used to make charcoal. And deforestation is one of the reasons we had that mudslide,” he said.

He needed money to start making these briquettes. The machine for churning out briquettes costs about $3,000. It was the paper bag business that funded his first briquette machine.

Alhaji Siraj Bah’s idea wasn’t an instant success. The first challenge was finding a formula that worked. “It took a lot of trials and errors,” he said. It’s easy to get coconut shells as many coconut juice vendors in the tropical city dispose of them casually. Alhaji gathered them and followed instructions online. For the first three months, the products didn’t work. “Producing good smokeless bio-briquettes is not easy,” Alhaji said. “A little mistake can weaken your finished product. They might smoke or not burn for as long as they’re supposed to. And so, I have to be very careful about the carbonization. I need to be cautious about how much smoke goes into the atmosphere. It’s a very technical process.”

It took several months after getting his formula right to make his first sale. “These people have been using wood charcoal for centuries. You can’t suddenly make them change that.” So, Alhaji kept pitching to people, preaching the gospel of saving trees and leaving free samples of his product across the city. Soon his roster of clients grew to include grocery stores around Freetown. Now he had a working business. He built an aluminum cabin to operate on the capital’s outskirts. He named the venture Rugsal Trading — after his mother, Rugiatu, and his late father, Salieu — and applied for grants across Africa and the United States.

He isn’t restricting himself to coconut shells. With an increasing demand for his product, he fears the abundant coconut shells may one day not be enough. “We’ve started testing other forms of biomass waste – palm kernel shells, rice husks, and so on. Because what if one day we run out of coconut shells? Or what if we start having orders larger than the coconut shells we can gather?”

Briquettes Made From Coconut Waste Could Reduce Deforestation | World Wide Waste

Meanwhile, the paper bag business hasn’t slowed down. It’s an active part of Alhaji’s quest to preserve the environment. The bags, made from 70 percent banana leaves, are an eco-friendly alternative to plastic bags. But now, he is seeking new ways to reduce plastic waste.

“I once attended a conference where they served us water in paper bottles. And because I’ve worked in a pure water factory, I’ve seen how much plastic waste comes from packaging water. Now we’re researching ways to make those eco-friendly bottles over here.”

Alhaji only wanted to create a solution for Freetown. But now he’s aware that there’s plenty he can do for Africa. “There are lots of opportunities in Africa,” he said. “You don’t have to be a genius. You just need to explore and start doing what you can with what you have.

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