Climate change is impacting us all, and we recognise the crucial role we play in creating a sustainable sugar industry and helping the UK Government meet its net zero targets.
As a supplier of world-class products to our customers and consumers around the world, we are conscious of the need to continue to deliver safe and high-quality products whilst minimising our impact on the world around us.
That’s why at British Sugar, we have always looked for innovative solutions and opportunities to reduce our impact.
We work closely with our growers to improve performance on farm by reducing inputs, at our factories we transform outputs from the sugar production process into valuable inputs for agriculture and other industries; and we work shoulder-to-shoulder with industry partners and customers to make improvements beyond our manufacturing base.
Our progress to date...
Since our baseline year of 2017/18, we have invested around £360 million to make our factories even more efficient, of which £140m has been invested directly into energy/carbon reduction projects. This has resulted in a reduction of scope 1 and 2 emissions, as well as a reduction in water usage.
Invested around
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in our factories, with
£140 million invested directly
in carbon reduction projects
Scope 1 and 2 emissions
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reduction
in energy use
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reduction
in water usage
Key areas of focus...
Greenhouse gas emissions
Water
Waste
Plastics
Greenhouse gas emissions
We have a continuous improvement programme to reduce emissions from the products we sell.
As a business we are committed to SBTi and our business commitment is to deliver a 52% reduction in Scope 1 and 2, 30% scope 3 and 36% FLAG (Forestry Land and Agriculture) by 2030. We also have committed to reach net zero by 2050.
We have made good progress to date in reducing emissions across scope 1 and 2 and we know there is more to do. Recently, at our Wissington site, we invested in a significant energy reduction project which has delivered a step-change reduction in onsite energy usage, with site emissions lowered by 30,000 tonnes of carbon a year, and demand for process steam reduced by 25%. We are replicating the design principles of this project, with ground broken at our Bury St Edmunds site. We are on track to fully commission work for the 2025/26 campaign. In addition, we are installing a new modular gas-fired combined heat and power plant at our Cantley site, which is due to be fully operational in 2025.
Our roadmap to get us to net zero sets out several key components across our supply chain, including plans to improve energy efficiency, switch to alternative fuels and explore lower emission transport fuels. We have full engagement throughout our business and are confident that we have plans in place to meet our ambition.
Water
Across our factories we have invested in a series of process adaptations, deployed new technologies and used architectural design techniques to reduce water usage.
More than 70% of sugar beet is water so we ensure that our sites make use of all water generated as part of the sugar production process, thereby significantly reducing the amount of water that we need to abstract from natural sources.
All the water that we use in our processes is sent to one of our water treatment plants on site prior to discharge to local waterways. To ensure that we adhere to the latest environmental compliance requirements, we have invested over £20m over the last two years to improve the quality of water discharged from our sites, with new water treatment facilities constructed at Newark and Cantley, as well as upgraded facilities at our Bury St Edmunds site.
These investments have improved the quantity of water we return to local waterways and ensures that we continue to meet discharge water quality requirements.
We have exciting feasibility assessments underway at two of our sites to understand if we can become totally water self-sufficient, almost eliminating the need to abstract water from local sources.
Waste
There is no such thing as waste here at British Sugar. We believe that good recycling segregation and waste management is not only good for our business, but good for the environment around us too. We have recycling centres at our five sites, which encourages the segregation of materials to help reuse and recycle as much as we can.
In addition, as well as producing around 1.2 million tonnes of sugar every year, we also produce a wide range of co-products by turning outputs from the sugar production process into valuable inputs. No part of our sugar beet crop goes to waste.
From animal feed to topsoil and renewable energy – in fact for every one tonne of sugar produced, there is only 200g of waste.
Find out more about our range of co-products here.
Plastics
As a business, we do not use a significant amount of plastic as most of our products are sold in paper bags or delivered to our customers in bulk tankers. However, we recognise that there is always more we can do.
In 2024, our Bury Customer Supply site has undergone a multi-million-pound investment to drive operational efficiencies, but in line with these improvements, we have also been able to reduce our use of paper and plastics by around 50% and completely remove single-use labels.
We continue to look for ways to reduce the use of plastics in our business.
