News: Award for Bioconvision Uganda

Africa-First-Ambassador Sheila von Hoerner transforms bio-waste into animal feed and fertiliser. This has now earned her and her team the ‘Circular Economy Innovation Award’.

The water hyacinth, a tropical floating-leaf plant, is beautiful to look at, but poses a major problem for people and communities living on Lake Victoria in eastern Central Africa. This is because, due to its rapid growth, the hyacinth blocks fishing routes, hinders transport, depletes the oxygen in the water and destroys fish spawning grounds.

Sheila von Hoerner, who lives by Africa’s largest lake, has turned the supposed problem into a business model. „As we watched enormous amounts of biomass accumulate along the shoreline, we kept asking ourselves a simple question: What can we do with all of it?”, she said recently in an interview with the Ugandan news portal Nile Post.

With the Bioconvision Uganda team, she therefore developed an innovative concept: water hyacinths removed from the lake are not treated as waste, but fed, together with organic waste collected from markets, hotels, restaurants and agriculture, to the larvae of the Black Soldier Fly.

The larvae break down the organic material, producing protein-rich insect meal which is processed into livestock and poultry feed. In addition, nutrient-rich fertiliser for agriculture ist generated.

“Young people and local communities now earn incomes”

For this concept, the company received the ‘Circular Economy Innovation Award’ in June as part of the Ugandan National Environment Sustainability Awards, and the Nile Post headlined: “How One Woman Turned Lake Victoria’s Water Hyacinth into an Award-Winning Green Business”

The model “embodies the principles of the circular economy”, in which waste materials are continuously reused, the story says. Furthermore, the innovation has created new employment opportunities throughout the entire value chain:  “Young people and local communities now earn incomes through waste collection, transporting water hyacinth, insect farming, logistics, processing and the distribution of animal feed and organic fertiliser.”

“Our vision is to demonstrate that waste is not a problem to be managed but a resource to be harvested”, Sheila is quoted as saying in the Nile Post story “By creating valuable products, we can finance environmental solutions in a sustainable way.” Bioconvision is now planning to expand to more communities around Lake Victoria.