Retailing Charcoal Briquettes
Use
Key supporting resources for the production of charcoal briquettes towards conserving nature
Farmers. Farmers are the key players in this process for the production of agricultural residues that are used as our raw materials.
Organized transport systems: Raw material sources are always scattered, and they need to be collected and transported to the production facility. This requires consolidating them for easy transportation. There is need for reliable means of transport that have to be used efficiently and effectively
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Retail outlets and distribution centers. When briquettes are produced, communities’ members need to be accessing them without any hustles. This requires the recruitment of retailers to stock these products.
Pricing mechanisms. Switching the communities to the new alternative sources of cooking energy requires offering them with reduced price that will attract them. To achieve this, entrepreneurs need to consider minimizing their production costs by analyzing the production process.
Labour intensive. The process of collecting raw materials from farmers is labour intesnsive. Loading and offloading from the trucks also requires labour. Soring of raw materaisl is another area also. Packaging of the product is also labour intensive.
Good rainfall for agricultural residues. Climate changes caused by factors such as deforestation have affected rainfall patterns hence reduced harvests.
Formation of partnerships helps in establishing permanent and reliable sources of raw materials.
Availability of retail outlets that are within the reach of the community members.
Availability of manpower to join the processing of charcoal briquettes which is always regarded as dirty job
To ensure retail outlet coverage, it was learnt that the established sellers of firewood are the best ones to be recruited. They have experience selling firewood and can easily influence their customers to start using charcoal briquettes to save the environment. However, one of the challenges faced is that some retailers see the introduction of charcoal briquettes as a threat to their established business.
Another challenge is that transporters tend to raise their prices once they discover that the waste they are hired to transport are turned into cash. This is where the need for organized transport system matters.
It has been noted that the majority of labour available is from women This provides an opportunity to empower men to do the jobs that would always have been done by men