A field engagement with Pyropower on what happens when smallholder farmers are handed an open-source kiln that turns crop waste into energy and soil, and the technology becomes theirs to adapt.
Crop waste that was being burned in the open, costing farmers nothing and earning them nothing, becomes, through a portable pyrolysis kiln, a source of heat, a soil amendment that raises yields, and a way into the carbon market: three forms of value pulled from one waste stream.
This is a circular-economy transition at the smallest and most demanding scale: the individual smallholding, off-grid, with little margin for a technology that does not earn its keep almost immediately.
Most clean-energy transitions are studied at the scale of grids and utilities. The interesting and difficult version happens at the scale of a single farm of under two hectares, where the household grows coffee, cocoa, cassava, candlenut, rice, or tobacco, and where every input and every hour is counted. Pyropower began exactly here, on a small island in Lombok, among farmers for whom the technology had to make sense in the terms of their own working day.
What makes the case unusually rich is a deliberate design choice: in 2020 Pyropower open-sourced the kiln. That single decision changes the nature of the transition the Lab is observing. An open-source device is not a product a farmer receives; it is a technology a community can adapt to local needs and materials, lower the cost of, and cut the middlemen out of. The farmers in Lombok nicknamed the device Tumbuh, Bahasa for "to grow", because of what biochar did to their fields. A technology that earns a local name from its users is a technology that has crossed into their world rather than been imposed on it.
That crossing is the thing worth studying.
The kiln's appeal is that it answers more than one problem at once. A farmer feeding it organic waste gets thermal energy, which matters concretely to, for example, a tobacco farmer who would otherwise burn firewood to cure leaves. They get biochar, which returned to the soil replenishes degraded land and raises crop yield, feeding directly back into food security. And they gain a potential entry point into the biochar and carbon-credit market. A modest input of organic waste yields both usable heat and several kilograms of biochar
, a conversion of something worthless, even harmful when open-burned, into three distinct goods.
The Lab's interest is in how a household actually weighs those three values. Which one does the work of adoption, the fuel saving, the yield increase, or the carbon income? The answer is rarely the one a project assumes, and it tends to differ by crop, by season, and by household. This is precisely the kind of question that survey headcounts miss and that only direct, structured conversation with farmers can answer.
When a technology is open-source, the transition stops being about distribution and starts being about appropriation, in the good sense. The kiln can be adapted to local applications, built with local materials, and maintained without dependence on a distant supplier. For the Lab, this raises the most important socio-technical questions in the case: Who in the community actually has the skills and capital to build and run one? Does open-sourcing widen access, or does it quietly concentrate the benefit among those already best resourced? Does the carbon-market opportunity reach the farmer, or get captured upstream?
These are not criticisms of the model; they are the questions that determine whether its promise is realised fairly. They are answerable only on the ground, and only by asking.
Pyropower's arc, from smallholder fields in Lombok to processing spent coffee grounds in the Netherlands, where hundreds of millions of kilos are produced annually, shows a technology and a circular-economy logic travelling between a developing-country context and a European one. The same core idea, organic waste into energy and biochar, lands very differently in a Lombok smallholding and a Dutch coffee-waste stream. Understanding why is exactly the comparative, context-sensitive work the Lab is built for.
A technical assessment would measure the kiln's energy output, biochar yield, and carbon sequestration. A development assessment would count farmers reached and tonnes of waste diverted. Both are necessary; neither tells you whether the transition is taking root in people's actual lives.
The Lab works from the human side first. We would ask what changed for a household after the kiln arrived, in income, in labour, in the condition of their land, and trace that change back through the technology that produced it. We would look hard at the distribution of benefit: who adopted, who did not, and why. And we would treat the carbon-market promise sceptically until the evidence shows it reaching the farmer rather than stopping short. That combination, genuine understanding of the pyrolysis technology, paired with rigorous fieldwork on what it does to livelihoods, is what lets a project tell the difference between a device that works and a transition that holds.
The Delft connection is not incidental. The Lab's own roots run through Delft, and a Delft-based spin-out working at the smallholder scale in Indonesia is close to home, both geographically, in the Lab's network, and intellectually, in the questions it raises.
Pyropower is a clean instance of a pattern the Lab sees across sectors: a transition that succeeds not by delivering a finished product but by handing over a capability, and whose fairness depends entirely on who can take that capability up. Decentralisation and open-sourcing are powerful precisely because they move control toward the user, but moving control is not the same as distributing benefit evenly, and the gap between the two is where the real research question lives.
Waste into worth is the easy part to demonstrate. Worth into whose hands is the part that matters.
For the Lab's field methods, see Field Research. For impact measurement of programmes like this, see Impact Measurement. See also Resilience Is Downstream of the Buyer on why the offtake relationship decides what a smallholder can adopt, and The Right That Matters Is to the Tree on why the rights position decides what a land programme actually delivers. To discuss a study, see Contact.
If this reads close to a decision you are weighing, we would like to hear about it. A short note is enough to start.
The Lab is an independent research team, not an advocacy organisation. We do not campaign, endorse products, or accept commissions where a finding is expected in advance. Where a partner's own theory of change is what needs testing, that is a legitimate engagement, and the Lab tests it honestly.