Environmentally Friendly Bagasse – Seperating Pulp Fact From Pulp Fiction
What is bagasse?
Bagasse is the by product from harvesting sugar cane. After the juice is extracted from the sugar cane plants the fibrous remainder is what is known as bagasse.
For every 10 tonnes of sugarcane produced, 3 tonnes of bagasse is produced. Sugarcane is one of the 1.83 billion tonnes are produced world wide every year, meaning that 610 million tonnes of bagasse are produced. In Australia last year alone 36500 tonnes of sugar cane was crushed to produce sugar. This means that it is in plentiful supply by virtue of the fact people like sugar. It requires no extra crops to be grown or resources to be consumed, rather converting a previously useless byproduct into packaging material.
Sugarcane also grows quickly, reaching maturity in 9 months, compare this to the 20-35 years it takes to grow back a commercial paper forest and you can see the appeal of bagasse in terms of its renewability.
Being made of natural plant based material, bagasse is biodegradable and compostable. This means that in the right conditions it can be broken down into biomass within 90 days. This gives it the potential to minimise the landfill burden and environmental pollution caused by traditional packaging materials like plastics and foam which can take up to 1000 years to break down.
So its very environmentally friendly, but how does it perform?
Bagasse is a sturdy lightweight material that can be shaped into many clams, bowls, trays, cups or pretty much any other shapes you can think of.
It is freezer safe and microwave safe and considered safe up to 90o Celsius.
It has a slightly rougher consistency than cardboard and feels slightly heavier than its styrofoam equivalent.
All in all bagasse is an eco friendly, high performing substitute for many of your paper, foam or plastic take away packaging items.
Otherwise if you feel like getting on the bagasse please contact your rep or call the office on (02) 9052 9111