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About Us
Our Businesses
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Water is the medium in which we grow yeast and it is also used for cooling and cleaning equipment in our factories. Our water stewardship strategy focuses on a ‘Four R’ approach: Return, Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. Water that we return to the environment must be treated to standards that meet or exceed regulations in the countries where we operate. In some cases, water treatment also results in valuable by-products which can be used to produce fertiliser, animal feed or a source of energy.
Our sites predict future water treatment legal requirements so that upgrades can be future-proofed. Guided by this strategy, we have invested more than $120m in water treatment since 2010. A recent example of this investment is a new wastewater treatment installation paired with a biogas co-generation plant at our site in Pederneiras, Brazil, which will both improve water quality and produce electrical and thermal energy from steam and hot water.
The waste water anaerobic digestion facility at AB Mauri's yeast plant in Pederneiras, Brazil
The installation utilises digesters: a process that uses anaerobic digestion in the treatment of wastewater to produce biogas. It can also then treat this biogas so it can be used as a fuel source and transformed into energy via a co-generation plant.
Following our investment and strategic approach to water stewardship, we have seen a steady year-on-year increase in the proportion of water used that is treated and returned safely to the environment, up from 74% in 2018/19 to 84% in 2023/24. We are approaching the theoretical maximum of this water return KPI due to the water which leaves the site in our products or through production process evaporation. We are now moving to the next water circularity phase focused on Reduce, Reuse and Recycling of water into our facilities, and measuring our performance through an evolution of our KPI metrics.