British Sugar

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Producing over one million tonnes of sugar in the UK every year, British Sugar is the leading supplier of sugar to the UK market, and is part of the British Sugar Group, owned by Associated British Foods plc. Sustainability in all forms is a key pillar of the company’s operating ethos, with a series of targets developed to add to its substantial environmental improvement methodology.

The company has invested around £1 billion over the last two decades – including purchasing and installing various energy-efficient technologies – to continuously improve its use of raw materials, with the eventual aim of transforming all raw materials used into sustainable products.

Stringent energy reduction targets are in place throughout British Sugar, with a goal of a 30% reduction in the amount of energy used to produce a tonne of sugar by 2020, as measured against the company’s 1990 baseline and to date, there has been a 25% reduction in the energy needed to produce each tonne of sugar. In October 2008, British Sugar became the first sugar manufacturer on the globe to certify the carbon footprint of granulated sugar using the then-new PAS 2050 method – the first standard for measuring the lifecycle of greenhouse gas emissions of goods and services. The company’s sugar has a carbon footprint of 0.6g of carbon CO2 per gram of product, and they are targeting a 10% reduction of PAS 2050 certified carbon footprints by 2020.

A key element in the company’s strategy to reduce energy and CO2 emissions is the use of combined heat and power (CHP) plants. Though the use of CHP plants is gradually becoming more widespread, particularly within larger businesses and organisations, British Sugar has fully maximised its use of this technology, with over 95% of its electricity generated through these means.

Many of the company’s innovative environmental methods can be seen when examining the British Sugar site in Wissington, Norfolk, the largest beet sugar factory in the world and recognised as one of the most efficient factories in Europe.

The site hosts the UK’s first bioethanol refinery, situated adjacent to the sugar factory, which began production in 2007. The factory uses a residual feedstock from the sugar process for yeast fermentation, followed by distillation and produces the pure alcohol – bioethanol. It is mixed with petrol at up to 5% inclusion – and used in cars running on ordinary unleaded petrol.

Wissington’s bioethanol production offers a CO2 emissions saving of over 70% relative to petrol when measured on a full lifecycle basis. The Wissington site alone produces 55,000 tonnes of bioethanol a year and was the first bioethanol plant in the UK, also receiving the award for ‘Best New Project’ in 2007 from the Renewable Energy Association.

To maximise the efficiency and solid environmental credentials of its bioethanol production, British Sugar is also able to supply comprehensive ‘traceability’ details of the product, including a full lifecycle analysis, which demonstrates that the entire production process – including crop growing, fermentation and distribution – is carried out in such a way that genuine environmental benefits are delivered.

Wissington’s power generation, via its CHP plant, is also crucial to the site’s bioethanol production. The factory’s CHP system produces steam and electricity using gas turbine technology, and at the end of the process over 50MW is available to be exported into the local electrical grid – enough for 120,000 people.

British Sugar further ensures the energy efficiency of its operations through the appointment of an Energy Management Team. This group identifies opportunities to save energy wherever possible (in areas including: power-saving drives; lighting management schemes; compressed air savings, and; reducing dilution) and makes regular checks that the company’s considerable investments go hand-in-hand with the various energy conservation initiatives. An ‘innovation pipeline’ is also in place at the company, allowing any staff member to put forward energy reduction ideas for consideration by the group that lead the Energy Management Team.

The company also has a number of other initiatives in place to increase sustainability and lower environmental impact, including a server virtualisation programme at its central offices in Peterborough, which will both reduce carbon emissions from IT equipment and handle the company’s increasing need for computers. The virtualisation system partitions each server computer into multiple virtual servers, thus increasing overall server efficiency. This technique has led to a 50% reduction in the level of energy required by the server estate for power and cooling.