S-Cane Pack

Eco-friendly products are gaining market in recent years as public is coming to value the benefit of environment friendly products and practices.Awareness rise as the world population is expanding, demanding greater need for materials, meanwhile landfills are filling up and pollution on Earth increases. The project is aimed as part of contribution towards environmental cause. S-Cane Pack is a food packaging prototype that will be made from sugarcane waste.It is an experimental based project in which raw sugarcane waste will be processed to extract the fiber, formed into paper and molded into a packaging shape.Recently, there are many researches and few commercialize products made from plant fibers such as wheat straw, cotton, flax, corn waste, rice husk, ramie and palm oil waste. Plant fiber resources are in favor because it is renewable, widely distributed, available locally and also biodegradable.Creating S-Cane Pack has the potential to be a partial solution to many environmental problems such as deforestation and shortage of landfill space. Presently, huge amount of trees are being cut off to obtain wood for pulping process in paper making industry. The significance of the project is to seek alternatives for wood in the paper making process to reduce deforestation by utilizing farm waste such as sugarcane. Not only the rate of deforestation will be reduced, S-Cane Pack also promotes recycling of waste rather than just being thrown away and further increases the landfill space. The outcome of the project is a packaging prototype made from sugarcane waste which exhibit reasonable properties in terms of its tensile strength and also appearance wise. Tensile strength of the prototype is also compared with the existing packaging available in the market such as Styrofoam, cardboard and paper. S-Cane pack is found out to have a comparable tensile strength with Styrofoam but weaker than cardboard and paper in terms of tensile strength. However, there are future recommendations to be made to further enhance the quality of the prototype. Creating a biodegradable packaging material from sugarcane waste would not only have significant benefits for today’s environment, economy, technology and society but for the future as well.