The Sugar Beat

The gem of the Mill is that little pellet, and what it can do to solve an old problem. Here's why it's important.

When sugar cane stalks are crushed, the fiber remains are what's called bagasse. Sugar producers dump the bagasse in sky-high piles like this. There can be hundreds of thousands of tons of the stuff.

Many sugar mills, like Neville's, save energy for the community by using that bagasse to feed boilers, and generate steam for the mills.

The problem? There's just so much darn bagasse that, at the end of the season, thousands of tons still remain. So...

"We take low density bagasse and turn it into high density brickets. That's what we're trying to do"

Enter this contraption. Neville bought it from a Brazilian company, and if it works like he thinks, could give him and others an extra instrument for income.

The machine takes the bagasse from this form, and compacts it into these bite size pellets. Now, the mountain of bagasse can shrink - and those little briquettes? Millers can re-sell them.

And here's the best part - all of that excess bagasse, sitting in mounds as big as a 10-story building? They can be shipped anywhere.

With the briquettes? You could ship them anywhere you'd like. To electric generators across the road, across the state, across the country - wherever. Bagasse that used to just sit there and take up space? Now it can power whole communities.

It truly is the best of all worlds.

"Really a fuel. You can use it as fuel. Like BBQ. Like a piece of charcoal. Just has a little more caloric value than charcoal."

Neville Dolan will keep working with the product. He says at some point he'll try to convert these briquettes to ethanol, although that's still somewhere in the future.

"So we really experiment and see what's best for us."

Until then, the little pellets will be a symbol of what once was waste, now could be farming gold.