Cambodia's Green Ledger: ecological transition pathways for waste, water, energy and forests — a pre-feasibility study

Abstract

Cambodia’s Green Ledger sets out practical pathways for Cambodia’s ecological transition. It examines fourteen ways to turn pressures on waste, water, energy and forests into services and products that can pay for themselves: refuse-derived fuel for cement kilns, traceable textile offcuts, PET aggregation, insect protein, commercial rooftop solar, rice-husk cogeneration, cashew-shell liquid, arsenic-safe piped water, biochar and nature value chains, coconut residues, used cooking oil, starch-effluent biogas, kiln-free blocks and commercial sorting. It also sets out the policy measures that would unlock them, and nearly forty low-cost moves that hotels, food businesses, markets, public offices, schools and communities can start with (Part VIII). The study combines a diagnosis, international evidence on what made similar transitions work elsewhere, a technology screen, unit economics with annual cash flows and a material balance. It adds a bounded 90-day instruction for government, six checks to apply before buying, the study’s limits, a register of key claims, a change log, discussion sheets and a French synthesis. About 470 sources are cited. Status: a pre-feasibility study for policy and technical discussion. The financial results are illustrative scenarios built from public data and stated assumptions, not observed project returns. The ±30% is a planning allowance on cost inputs, not a confidence interval on the IRRs. No field audit, independent engineering validation or institutional endorsement is claimed. Publication does not establish technical feasibility, investment readiness or government approval. Files: full report (revision 2.5, 81 pages); Part VIII extract with a French summary (revision 2.4, 9 pages, unchanged); financial workbook (revision 2.1, unchanged). Version 2.5 adds six checks before buying, with Cambodian evidence where it exists: cutting food losses before buying cold storage, cooling buildings before cooling the air, qualifying plastic substitutes (including PFAS in some fibre packaging), affordable small refills, coconut-fibre wastewater filters, and contracting rice residues. A box explains why ecological restoration can fail even when planting succeeds. No financial model figure, tier or IRR has changed since version 2.3. Author’s contribution: conception and framing (question, scope, audiences, editorial rules). The author suggested the ecological improvement options, the lines of online archive research and the internationally applied transition methods to examine, including, in revision 2.5, unpainted metal roofing as a lower-cost option where glare allows. He contributed personal observations in Cambodia in 2026 and directed the research and the reviews. He read the work critically, made personal checks of sources and calculations, and decided on every proposed change. The author is responsible for all of the content. Use of AI: AI tools were used for the search and analysis of articles and online archives, and to assist with drafting and calculations (Anthropic’s Claude, under the author’s direction). The four documentary reviews were AI-assisted (OpenAI’s Codex). Every figure comes from a cited source or from the stated model; no field data or observations were generated by AI. AI tools are not authors. Correspondence: Louis Robert Bouille, independent researcher · louisrobert@lrb-research.org · ORCID 0009-0004-7107-3749. Licence: CC BY 4.0; cited sources retain their own rights.