The sour smell of success goes on at York's British Sugar factory. Business editor Ron Godfrey pays a visit

CONTROL: Keith Booth monitors the situation in the British Sugar factory control room.

BULLDOZED: The beet is bulldozed into giant heaps in the storage area which holds 20,000 tonnes

CRYSTALISED: Danny Cocker on the pan floor of the factory where sugar is crystalised.

Pictures: Garry Atkinson

That whiff of burned caramel and vegetation hovering over York is a sure signal that The Campaign at the British Sugar factory in Boroughbridge Road is now in full swing but if you are looking for a quick cure to that pucker-faced pong then... don't hold your breath.

The Campaign is the name given to the annual 20-week struggle ending next month to process around 1.3 million tonnes of the region's beet crop and complaints about the odour billowing from its high chimney are as regular and certain as autumnal fall.

Here's the sweet news: British Sugar claims to be doing all it can to stem the stench, even to the extent of commissioning a team of scientists and engineers two years ago to investigate what world technologies have to offer by way of a cure and trials will continue over the next two years.

Here's the bitter news: An interim report by this team to the environment agency suggests that there is not much the world can teach the York factory on how to staunch a stink.

Sherif Hassanein, factory manager of this third biggest out of nine British Sugar plants owned by Associated British Foods, says: "We are leading the way in odour removal and there is not much greater technology around which we don't have already. The caramelised odour is one of the most complex technical issues we have to solve."

But The Campaign must go on because it is essential to the economy of North Yorkshire.

The county's 1,300 beet growers, celebrating a bumper crop this year, will earn up to £50 million in the process, and York, the chocolate city, relies heavily on its share of the daily output of 500 tonnes stored in three silos on the 95-acre site. The factory's rate bill alone to the City of York council is around £470,000.

And then there are the jobs: the factory's permanent workforce of 104 rises to 186 during The Campaign to ensure the smooth offloading of laden lorries into wash-off plants where the beet is sliced, pulped, evaporated, crystallised and gran-ulated into underground surging white rivers of sparkle.

But most of the workers in this high-tech sugar city are white-coated technicians monitoring every step of the crystallisation process, every surge in the millions of therms of gas needed to power the plant, every revolution of the awesome diffuser as cylindrical and as massive as a leaning tower of Pisa on its side. Massive investment is needed to maintain and upgrade the systems. In the mid 1990s there was a £17 million expansion in the factory's capacity from 7,000 tonnes of beet, a day to 9,000 tonnes.

Now an even bigger project is proposed. As previously reported in the Evening Press, the Department of Trade and Industry has granted approval for a £35 million plan to install a new boiler house replacing the existing plant there with an environmentally friendly combined heat and power system, which will provide electricity for the huge steaming process.

Mr Hassanein said: "It is now going through planning applications and is also going through our own internal capital procedures and we hope to have a board of directors' decision by the end of next month. If approved it could take two years before it is operational."

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.