Most of the products that we use are made from Sugar Cane Bagasse of PLT. This page provides a brief overview about these materials.
This material is like a thick paper with high performance qualities. For example, one might compare the thickness of our plates to the high quality Chinet branded plates made from trees.
Sugar Cane Bagasse: Bagasse (sometimes spelled bagass) is the biomass remaining after sugarcane stalks are crushed to extract their juice. (Wikipedia) As recently as 1993, Bagasse was essentially a waste product that causes sugar mills to incur additional disposal costs.
In tropical regions of the world sugar cane represents a major crop. Because of the increasing demand for sugar in the last century, large areas in the tropical and subtropical countries all around the world were allotted for sugar cane crops, lower level of maintenance and good productivity made sugar cane an attractive crop for farmers in there regions. Most of the high sucrose verities are fully ripened and ready for harvest when they are 10 to 15 months old. Accordingly, sugar cane bagasse is very much an annually renewable resource.
Once harvested, sugarcane is crushed in a series of mills, each consisting of at least three heavy rollers. Due to the crushing, the cane stalk will break in small pieces, and subsequent milling will squeeze the juice out. The juice is collected and processed for production of sugar. The resulting crushed and squeezed cane stalk, is bagasse.
Further, in some factories around the world, the sludge left over after removing the cellulose fibers in creating bagasse, is used to power the actual papermills. The resulting CO2 emissions in burning bagasse are equal to the amount of CO2 that the sugarcane plant used up from the atmosphere during its growing phase. Consequently, the resulting heat from this process appears to be greenhouse gas-neutral.
