Do you know what these beautiful lunch boxes with delicious food in the picture are made of? PP polypropylene? PS polystyrene? Or cardboard?
In fact it is made of sugarcane bagasse, which is the waste material from sugar production.
So what is bagasse?
Sugarcane bagasse is 100% natural plant fiber, which is compostable and biodegradble. it is by-product from cane sugar production, kind of natural fiber waste. Sugarcane farming produces approximately 79% of all of the world’s sugar. It means there is a lot of bagasse produced–about 3 tons of bagasse for every 10 tons of sugarcane processed.
The most common use for bagasse is to burn it as a fuel source. Unfortunately, burning bagasse releases large amounts of CO2, a major greenhouse gas, back into the atmosphere. Bagasse has also seen limited use as animal feed.
If most bagasse is burned or discarded, it wastes resources and pollutes the environment. How to make full use of bagasse, turn waste into treasure and protect the environment? That is, bagasse is made into various things, such as tableware and other products packaging, like electronic products, cosmetic packaging and so on.
The length of bagasse fiber is about 0.65-2.17 mm and the width is 21-28 μm, it is shorter than wood fiber and bamboo fiber, but it is longer than straw and wheat grass fiber. In this case, sugarcane bagasse is the best material to make pulp molded tablewaremore since it has suitable fiber length and well enough to support good hardness of tableware and has more economical than tree and bamboo fiber.