Sameerwadi, Karnataka in India is looking into the various ways money can be made off the waste from sugarcane processing. After juice is pressed out of sugarcane, a fiber waste called bagasse is left over. A whole lot of bagasse. As a way to insulate sugarcane businesses from variations in market prices, a few technologies to turn bagasse into a usable substance are popping up.

On the one hand, Godavari Sugar Mills Ltd will use the fiber to make ethanol. The project hopes to be able to scale up from demonstration size to commercial size within a few years, processing about 5,000 tons of bagasse within four years, but they don’t state how much ethanol they plan to make with it. GSML also wants to make items like paper, cardboard, textiles, water-soluble adhesives, cements, dyes – even L-lactic acid – and other items from the waste to help make the facility viable. In other words, they don’t feel they’ll make very much from ethanol production. It’s the high-grade cellulose, lignin and hemicellulose derived from bagasse that will be the money makers.

Getting as much product and profit from sugarcane in both its edible and nonedible forms is the exact way we can make crops stretch and hopefully reduce the amount of the earth’s resources used to make various products.

Via TreeHugger, LiveMint; photo via GSML