In Taiwan, you can often find street vendors selling freshly-squeezed sugar cane juice. This is a popular drink that some even say benefits the health. But the leftover pulp from the sugarcane usually gets thrown away, creating heaps of trash. Now a state-run company has found a way to reuse the loads of pulp.
In the future you could well be eating mushrooms grown from sugarcane pulp. State-run Taiwan Sugar Corp. has found a way to use the pulp of sugarcane stalks to cultivate edible mushrooms, allowing the pulp to serve a purpose rather than being thrown away.
The company packages the pulp into bags that it rents out to mushroom farmers. This helps the farmers cut down on costs since it costs slightly less than the traditional medium from growing mushrooms-- sawdust.
In the past, about 2,300-hectares of forest would be cut down every year to produce enough sawdust for mushroom growers. With the use of sugarcane pulp, 50 percent fewer trees need to be cut down. This makes sugarcane pulp a more eco-friendly as well as a more economical medium for growing mushrooms.
As if all this wasn’t enough, sugarcane pulp is actually better for the mushrooms, too, producing 20 to 30 percent more mushrooms than sawdust. After the mushrooms are harvested, the pulp bags are returned and recycled a second time to produce organic fertilizer.
Taiwan Sugar has won an award this year for coming up with this idea, a win-win situation for Taiwan Sugar, mushroom farmers, and the environment.