British Sugar Case Study - Water

Sustainability is at the heart of everything British Sugar do as a business. Their parent company, AB Sugar, recently launched their 2030 sustainability commitments including building vibrant, diverse value chains that increase the prosperity of their communities, providing objective scientific advice on sugar, diet and health to over 25 million people around the world. Also, they aim to reduce their end-to-end supply chain water and CO₂ footprints by 30% and ensure that all their plastic packaging is reusable, recyclable, biodegradable or compostable.

Since 2014, British Sugar has reduced water usage across its operational activities by 26.15%, which represents enough water to supply over 2,000 homes with enough water to use in a year. This also aligns to British Sugar’s commitment to the Food and Drink Federation challenge to reduce water usage by 20% by 2020.

British Sugar have taken action across all their sites to reduce water usage. This has included training and education, installation of better hoses for cleaning, the installation of a system at Cantley to use waste condensate water rather than river water for certain processes, the installation of a tertiary water treatment plant at network to displace towns mains water usage with cooled excess process condensate or treater water, and halving the amount of water going to drain at Wissington through improved monitoring and new cleaning system for part of the purification process.

View Ambition 2025 Progress Report 2018