There is a huge need in rural Vietnam for biogas digesters, but awareness is low. This project set out to do three things: amplify the benefits of biogas digesters to farmers, teach people how to build them, and help fight climate change. It has worked. Here’s how:

The Farmer

Awareness of biogas digesters came to Nguyen Dong through this project. He lives on his family’s farm growing tea and raising pigs. Two of his largest expenses were for chemical fertilizers and charcoal for cooking, and his biggest headaches was disposing tonnes of pig manure. A biogas digester, he learned, would convert all that animal waste into clean cooking fuel for the household and organic fertilizer for the crops. He did the math: the biogas digester would pay for itself in two to three years. So he called his friend, Ngoc Bay, to build one.

The Builder

Ngoc Bay gladly made time in his busy schedule to build a digester for Nguyen Dong. He has the skills to do so because he was trained as a mason by this project. He has built over a thousand digesters to date. Everybody, it seems, wants a biogas digester, and he can’t keep up with demand, so he has hired and trained an ever-growing staff. Business is booming, with no end in sight.

The Climate

There are thousands and thousands of such stories across Vietnam. It’s a phenomenon. Nearly 158,000 digesters have been installed to date, helping people, creating jobs, and in the process, eliminating over one million tonnes of CO₂ emissions every year.

Thank you for supporting this project, and Earth, in 2018.