Environmental

ENVIRONMENTAL: CONSUMING RESOURCES RESPONSIBLY

10 February 2026

Decarbonising our operations

At British Sugar, we care about our impact on the world around us. We have worked hard over many years to improve energy efficiency in our factories, and more recently have utilised our engineering expertise to undertake a series of step-change investments to further decarbonise our operations.

Here’s an overview of what we’ve been up to and the plans we have for our four factories:

• At our Wissington factory in Norfolk, we designed and installed a major, multi-million-pound energy reduction project which involved installing a new evaporator, heat exchanges and processing equipment. The project has reduced site emissions by 30,000 tonnes of carbon a year. The project was commissioned and operating for the start of the 2023/24 sugar beet campaign and reduced the site’s sugar production steam demand by 25% in its first year alone. We are also installing our biggest decarbonisation project to date at Wissington, a new steam drying plant. This project is set to remove a substantial 50,000 tonnes of Scope 1 carbon emissions from the site. The plant is in construction and is due to be commissioned and ready for the start of the 2026/27 sugar beet campaign in the Autumn.
• At Bury St Edmunds, a new decarbonisation project, replicating the Wissington energy reduction project was commissioned ready for the start of the 2025/26 campaign, helping to reduce site emissions by around 20,000 tonnes of carbon a year. We have also invested in decarbonising animal feed production on site, through improved mechanical pressing performance of the sugar beet pulp material and pre-heating of the dryer air using waste heat from our on-site Combined Heat and Power plant. This will reduce emissions by around 6,000 tonnes of carbon per year.
• At our Newark site, we have installed new heaters, which are used to heat the raw juice in the sugar production process, reducing the site’s annual fuel consumption by more than 19,000 MWh and reducing annual carbon emissions by more than 3,500 tonnes per annum.
• Finally, at Cantley, we have installed a new, modular gas-fired Combined Heat and Power plant on site, which will reduce carbon emissions by around 16,000 tonnes per year. The plant will also be set up for fuel flexibility as it can be fuelled by hydrogen too. The project was commissioned ready for the start of the 2025/26 campaign. We are also trialling work to reduce lime usage in the sugar production process at Cantley, which will bring energy and carbon reduction benefits.

As a business, we remain focused on using innovation and world-class engineering capabilities to drive efficiencies within our operations and work closely with our customers to reduce carbon emissions across our UK sugar supply chain.

Our recent investments have delivered a 31% reduction in Scope 1 and 2 market-based emissions against our baseline year of 2018.

As technology moves forward and develops, we will continue to consider all possible options to drive further decarbonisation across all our sites.