Better Disposable Coffee Cups

Sugar cane contains around 10% sugar and around 90% non-sugar, the material known as bagasse which remains once the cane has been pulverised and the sugar-bearing juice squeezed out of it. World production of cane sugar was 185m tonnes in 2017. That results in a lot of bagasse which at the moment is often burned. Often, it fuels local generators that power the mills, so it is not wasted, but Zhu Hongli, a mechanical engineer at Northeastern University in Boston, thinks it can be put to better use. As she and her colleagues describe, with a bit of tweaking bagasse makes an excellent—and biodegradable—replacement for the plastic used for disposable food containers such as coffee cups. - Forbes and Northeastern University