So, what does the Belizean sugar cane grower have to do with waste or energy or waste-to-fuel? First, a little background: There are 6000+ sugar cane farmers/growers in this small sub-tropical country and my friend, Leonardo, happens to be the largest grower there, having 1000 acres under till. He is also a visionary and has designed a model farm for his countrymen. We will explore one aspect at a time for Project Belize.

There’s a lot of sugar cane trash in sugar cane growing. And what is the composition of this “trash”? Many left-overs. Once the sugar cane has been harvested whether manually or mechanically, there are leftovers in the field consisting of leaves, blow-down, stubble, etc. (And I am your typical layman describing in non-technical terms). At the refinery, after the cane has been “processed,” there is a tremendous amount of bagasse, cachaza, filter press and other stuff – all containing vast amounts of waste energy. In Belize, their one refinery uses much of the waste for its co-generation plant as electricity (through steam turbines) to power the refinery and also to produce power for the electric utility.

What I’d like to focus on here is the leftover field trash and share Leonardo’s vision, too. Currently all the sugar cane harvesting is done manually with laborers wielding machetes; and all the fields are burned after harvest to “clean up” the fields and prepare for next year’s crop.

Here are two operations that can be mediated and have profound consequences. Other countries have growers and co-ops that have imported specially designed mechanical harvesting equipment that speeds up harvesting and hence, reduces employee/laborer injury and is vastly more efficient. However, there still is much “trash” left in the field that, until now, is burned.

The Field Trash Vision and what it entails: This is a multi-step process and will conceivably include many sugar cane growers in Belize. The vision, put simply, is to stop field burning. That’s easy to say and the environmentally correct thing to do but, why would farmers want to change what they’ve done successfully and for generations? What’s in it for them? They burn the fields. The smoke clears. The fields are clean for the next year. Life goes on.

As an aside, when in Guatemala working with the cane producers there, I asked a manager about pollution when their co-gens are spewing black smoke and ash into the air. And, when the plant is burning bunker oil after the bagasse has been spent but needs to continue to produce electrical energy for the grid. His reply was that his plant was out in the country where few people live and… Well, there are many who know that that smoke, that pollution travels in the wind currents all over the world – just as we know that when a volcano erupts or the Gobi Desert has a severe sand storm, those same wind currents carry what’s in the air “there” to “here.” So, there needs to be some paradigm shifts in perception and thought so that all of us, throughout our world, can get on the same play page.

To be continued…