Sweet As
Chelsea Sugar Refinery
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Chelsea currently refines some 240,000 tonnes of sugar products a year. Raw sugar liquor (which is imported from Queensland) is passed over filters to remove colourants before it goes through crystallisation and drying processes.
A number of issues had been building up over time and had to be addressed concurrently at the factory, which backs on to Auckland’s Waitemata Harbour. The previous decolourisation system relied on inefficient processes that hadn’t changed in 100 years and were labour intensive, required a lot of maintenance and wasted a lot of energy.
While most refining plants elsewhere in the world had switched to using carbon from petrochemical plants for filtering and de-colourising sugar, the New Zealand plant continued to import char from crushed cattle bones kilned in Scotland.
This case study is reproduced with permission from e.nz magazine. Subscriptions to e.nz are discounted for Schools and TENZ members.
