• aramis87@fedia.io
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    1 day ago

    There’s also the Guitang Group in China. They have a massive farm that grows sugar cane, which is processed at their sugar refinery and then sold. But the sugar refining process generates spent molasses, so they built a plant that takes the spent molasses and creates alcohol, which they then also sell.

    The alcohol plant also creates alcohol residue, so they built a fertilizer plant that makes the alcohol residue into fertilizer, which they use on their sugar cane farm.

    The sugar refinery also has crushed sugar cane as a result of their processing, so they built a plant to turn the crushed sugar cane into pulp, then a paper mill to turn the pulp into paper, which is sold.

    The pulp plant creates a black liquid as a side product, so they send that through an alkali recovery process; the recovered alkali is sent back to the pulp plant to create more pulp.

    The alkali recovery process also creates a white sludge byproduct so they built a cement mill. They take the white sludge from the alkali recovery process, along with the filter sludge that comes out of the sugar refinery, and make cement.

    So they wanted to sell sugar, but they’ve limited pollution and waste, improved their plantation’s output with inexpensive fertilizer, and also get to sell alcohol, paper and cement.