Growing bagasse

Bagasse Saccharum officinarum is an agricultural residue – the crushed stalks of sugarcane after the sugar has been extracted. Sugarcane is a grass with high fibre yield, but its short fibres (closer to hardwoods or eucalyptus) and high lignin and silica content increase pulping costs.

India, Mexico, Indonesia, Thailand, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, and South Africa all use bagasse for pulp production because of its fine newsprint qualities. Forty-five percent of all Mexican pulp comes from bagasse. Bagasse accounts for 12 percent of world production of non-wood fibres.

In the 1950s, the USA led the world in designing the tools for bagasse pulping. Cuba now leads. The Cuba-9 Experimental Center studies the application of high-yield bagasse to small-scale pulp mills. The Cubans search for maximum efficiency; a more energy-efficient sugar mill that uses surplus bagasse for fuel; a pulp/paper mill with a low-cost pulping process; animal feed from "waste," and other by-products. Bagasse-based paper pulp competes with other uses such as hardboard and insulation board. Since sugarcane waste is also used for a fuel at sugar mills, a balance must be struck between energy and pulp. In India, sugar mills must be linked to paper mills by law which, at times, stimulates exports of coal to compensate for fuel losses.