80.000-tonne sugar silo: Nordzucker reduces transport distances

New silo in Nordstemmen improves sustainability and energy efficiency

30-Jul-2024

New sugar silo at Nordzucker's Nordstemmen plant

Matthias Schulte, Nordzucker

The topping-out ceremony for a modern silo for granulated sugar was held today at our production site in Nordstemmen together with representatives from industry and politics. The silo is a further building block for Nordzucker to save on transportation and thus sustainably reduce the CO2 footprint of its products.

"Supplying our customers reliably and sustainably with regionally produced sugar is a very important goal for us. With the new silo in Nordstemmen, we avoid external interim storage and reduce truck transportation. In this way, we are gradually improving our ecological footprint by reducing truck transportation. The shorter distances to our customers also allow us to further reduce the CO2 footprint of our sugar and protect the environment. The investment in the new silo in Nordstemmen is just one building block in our plants in Lower Saxony on the way to climate-neutral sugar production," explains Executive Board member Alexander Godow, Chief Operating Officer at Nordzucker.

With the new sugar silo with a storage capacity of 80,000 tons, which corresponds to around 3,200 truckloads, Nordzucker is building one of the largest sugar silos in Germany. "The construction will give us significantly more storage space for sugar at the factory," says Elmar Kuhnt, Head of Sugar Factory Nordstemmen. "We have to transport less sugar to other silos and can store more sugar on site, saving not only time and storage costs, but also transportation routes."

The new building at the Nordstemmen factory will be able to store 80,000 tons of sugar. For this amount of sugar, around 560,000 tons of sugar beet will be processed in just over a month's campaign. The height of the silo, including the silo roof with the feeder, is around 53 meters, making it only slightly higher than the other silos. This means that the new silo fits in well with the appearance of the factory. The round silo wall with a thickness of around 70 centimetres - including the shell, insulation and heating system - spans an internal diameter of 56 meters. A total of over 8,000 cubic meters of concrete were poured into the wall and floor. Around 1,000 trucks had to drive to the construction site to deliver this amount of concrete.

At the Nordstemmen plant, the construction of the new silo with its positive effects is embedded in various measures, in particular to improve energy efficiency. Following the inauguration of a new fluorine gas-free energy distribution system last year together with Lower Saxony's Economics Minister Olaf Lies, further projects are on the agenda. These include vapor recompression and two new evaporators to further increase energy efficiency. "Saving energy is an important step towards sustainability at Nordzucker. All sites are involved in this process. The 80,000-tonne silo at the Nordstemmen plant will certainly make its contribution," summarizes Elmar Kuhnt.

Note: This article has been translated using a computer system without human intervention. LUMITOS offers these automatic translations to present a wider range of current news. Since this article has been translated with automatic translation, it is possible that it contains errors in vocabulary, syntax or grammar. The original article in German can be found here.

https://www.yumda.com/en/news/1184067/80-000-tonne-sugar-silo-nordzucker-reduces-transport-distances.html