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About Us
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At our Wissington factory in Norfolk, we have designed and invested in a major energy reduction project with the installation of additional evaporators, heat exchangers and processing equipment to significantly reduce the steam required in sugar manufacturing. The project has delivered a step-change reduction in site energy usage, with emissions lowered by 30,000 tonnes of carbon this year and demand for process steam reduced by 25%.
Our engineers are replicating the design principles at our three other UK processing sites to deliver similar results, with ground broken this year for the construction of similar plant and equipment at Bury St Edmunds. When complete, the site’s carbon emissions will be cut by around 20,000 tonnes per year.
A British Sugar engineer inspecting an evaporator at our factory in Wissington, UK
Alongside these projects, we have switched the fuel source for our animal feed dryers at Wissington to natural gas, reducing carbon emissions by 20,000 tonnes this year. We are also installing a modular gas-fired combined heat and power plant at our Cantley site, which is scheduled to be operational in 2025 and will reduce carbon emissions by around 16,000 tonnes per year. This technology sets us up for fuel flexibility as the plant can be fuelled by hydrogen too.
This work is enabled by the expertise of our in-house teams, who have carried out detailed process mapping across our operations to identify efficiencies. In total, our investments since 2017/18 have delivered a Scope 1 reduction of 21.2% for British Sugar against our baseline year of 2017/18. As technology develops, we will continue to consider all options to further drive decarbonisation across our sites and supply chain.