Biogas for tofu production
A water purification plant and a tofu factory that runs on biogas. At long last! The inhabitants of Dusun Krapyak, a village in the Sayegan district, no longer have to spend all their time making tofu.
Dusun Krapyak, a village in the province of Jogjakarta in Indonesia, is a well known tofu production centre in the region. It is the most important source of income for the village. In the past the villagers used mainly firewood for the production of tofu. Nowadays they use biogas for the production process.
The villagers take at least 5kg of soybeans to the Kaguma, a production facility the whole village can use. At the Kaguma, soybeans are processed into tofu. The energy required for this is provided by a biogas plant, in which wastewater from the tofu process is fermented to produce biogas that can be burned for the production process. Not only does this save energy and costs, it also reduces CO2 emissions.
The joint production facility is now used by three villages. Every day some twenty households bring their soybeans to the Kaguma to process this into tofu. This has made the production process significantly more efficient and economical. When the villagers were still using the facility independently it would take about five hours for them to make their tofu; now it only takes seven minutes.
Thanks to the Kaguma the villagers also save on production costs. Without the shared facility in their village it used to cost 2.5 dollars to turn 10kg of soybeans into tofu, now it only costs 1.6 dollars for 10kg of soybeans. They pay this to the organisation that operates the tofu factory.
Villagers can now use their time for other income-generating activities, such as working their land. The tofu factory was founded by NGO Lembaga Pengembangan Teknologi Pedesaan (LPTP), an organisation supported by Hivos.
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