New artificial sweeteners keep being invented, but sugar remains one of the world’s most popular ingredients — an estimated 194 million tonnes were produced between 2023 and 2024. Manufacturing all that sweetness comes with a cost. Along with detrimental health implications, the global sugar production industry has significant impacts on the
environment, contributing to water and air pollution, land degradation and a massive amount of agricultural waste — a main component of that being bagasse, the fibrous material left over from sugarcane after it has been pulverized to extract its juices. While the low-carbon, renewable material is often upcycled into paper and packaging or used as a biofuel, bagasse is still a relatively underutilized resource. With Sugarcrete, researchers at the University of East London (UEL) are ready to change that.

Alan Chandler (left) and Armor Gutiérrez Rivas (right) with Francisco Izquierdo, whose sugarcane and rum facility Ron El Mondero, in Granada, Spain, provides the researchers with bagasse.

Since 2021, Armor Gutiérrez Rivas, an architect and senior lecturer at the university’s Sustainability Research Institute (SRI), SRI associate Alan Chandler and SRI senior research fellow Bamdad Ayati have been leading a team of students in the development of Sugarcrete, a pioneering bio-based and low-carbon alternative to concrete. As part of a wider research and sustainability project to regenerate the Royal Docks waterfront, students from the design studio had approached local sugar-maker — and neighbour — Tate & Lyle Sugars with a proposal to collaboratively explore how to divert bagasse from its waste stream to use as construction materials for the area. Prototypes of the sustainable building blocks were realized by reinforcing the fibrous leftovers with a variety of mineral binders, producing a material with a carbon footprint “six times lower than clay brick and three times lower than concrete blocks of equal volume,” say Gutiérrez Rivas and Chandler. “Sugarcrete has been tested to industry standards for fire resistance, compressive strength, thermal conductivity and durability.”

Made from bagasse, a waste product from sugarcane production, Sugarcrete blocks sequester more carbon than clay and concrete of equal volume. PHOTO: Megan Jones

But Sugarcrete’s potential goes beyond bettering just the building industry. It will be positioned as an international grassroots initiative and open-source knowledge base aimed at benefiting economies and reviving heritage across Europe and the Global South. “The environmental benefit of cane cultivation provides a unique sensory character where the sight and sound of marine breezes have created waves of blue water and green sugarcane for over 1,400 years,” say Gutiérrez Rivas and Chandler. “Working with municipalities, local cane producers, construction supply chains and industry partners, [it can] re-establish the ‘green
sea’ and enable pilot production facilities that benefit from research, testing and CE certification and establish the credentials of the material for the European market” —
all while creating “a unique tourist experience unlike any in the region.”

A worker builds a wall using Sugarcrete blocks (samples of which are shown at right) at a school in India, the first prototype building to use the material. PHOTO: Husain Akbar

There is also the possibility to resurrect dormant cane plantations and transform defunct concrete factories into bio-based manufacturing facilities to bring industry back to regions that frequently rely on imported construction materials, giving local producers and makers the ability to create new, affordable and low-carbon vernacular building components. At its essence, Sugarcrete is more than a revolutionary material — it is a coalescence of design, sustainability and community impact. How sweet is that?