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Bagasse | Unwanted Byproduct or Clean Energy
By Greg | November 19, 2009
If you’ve ever found yourself putting on too much weight, you’ve no doubt pondered the question: “Exactly how much junk food do I have to eliminate from my diet in order to lose weight?” If you’re like me, the thought of eliminating any seems at least unpleasant, if not an impossibility. Also, if you’re like me, you keep wondering when someone will finally come up with a way for me to enjoy sweets without all that sugar turning into fat.
Now this dream is slowly becoming a reality. Perhaps not on the personal/metabolic level just yet, but it’s the first step. Here is what I am talking about:
When sugar juice is extracted from sugar cane, what’s left is a fiber called bagasse. Every 10 tons of sugar cane leaves 3 tons of the stuff. Until recently it was simply waste, but scientists realized that sugar cane bagasse can be used to produce energy; for example, energy used for sugar production. Get it? You take sugar cane and, with minimal overhead expenditure, you turn it into sugar.
Ok, so I am no scientist and I admit that I don’t really get exactly how this works. Still, I figure that if it is possible to cheaply produce something valuable without leaving any waste, then it is just a matter of time before some clever person comes up with a candy bar which can be enjoyed without leaving any waste, nothing that can be turned into fat. What if, instead of being stored under your chin or around your waist, the energy from your candy bar was somehow used to produce another candy bar (that you could also eat without gaining weight)? Now that’s the world I want to live in!
Before I explain how energy is produced by bagasse, let’s take our minds off the analogy of human metabolism. Here’s why: It works this way; bagasse is turned into little brown pellets which, when heated, turn into gas (I warned you!).
The cool thing about this kind of gasification technology is that, even though bagasse does emit some CO2, it is absolutely greenhouse gas neutral. But how can it be neutral if it produces harmful CO2? Here’s how: As sugar cane grows in the field, it absorbs CO2. When the bagasse is used as fuel, it emits the same amount of the gas as the plant absorbed while it was growing. Talk about ecological balance. What a perfect, clean coal!
There are other reasons why ecologists love bagasse. In India and South America 20% of paper is produced out of bagasse. No deforestation, less bleaching chemical used for refining bagasse than wood and sugar cane grows faster than trees! Bagasse is also used as material for the production of disposable dishes. Imagine going to a picnic and not seeing any Styrofoam ready to be absorbed by the soil in 40 or 50 years!
Take a look at how bagasse can change the world we live in:
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