Sugar refineries of the Astarta agricultural holding processed 1.844 million tonnes of sugar beet and produced 266,000 tonnes of sugar in 2021, which is 18% more than in 2020, the company said on Thursday.
“The organizational and technical measures carried out in the current season and the introduction of resource-saving technologies allowed Astarta to increase the energy efficiency of sugar production and reduce gas consumption for processing 1 tonne of beets by an average of 6% compared to 2020,” executive director of the company Valeriy Sokolenko said in a press release.
He added that in 2021, Hlobyne Sugar Refinery operated on biogas produced at company’s Hlobyne Bioenergy Complex from organic residues from sugar production (raw pulp).
Astarta also said that 99% of the produced sugar corresponds to the highest quality category, of which 53,000 tonnes are of extra quality.
Taking into account the processing of imported raw cane sugar, the agricultural holding’s total sugar production this year amounted to 339,000 tonnes, the press release says.
It indicates that the processing season lasted 100 days, the sugar content of raw materials remained at a high level and an average level for the holding’s enterprises amounted to 17.0% (on average in Ukraine, according to Ukrsugar, – 16.9%), and the sugar yield – 14.4% (14.2%).
Astarta recalled that in 2021, the holding’s enterprises harvested 1.584 million tonnes of sugar beet (yield – 47.4 tonnes/ha), 508,000 tonnes of corn (8.6 tonnes/ha), 94,500 tonnes of soybeans (3.0 tonnes/ha), 76,200 tonnes of sunflower (2.7 tonnes/ha), 268,000 tonnes of winter wheat (5.76 tonnes/ha) and 23,400 tonnes of winter rapeseed (3.24 tonnes per ha).
Astarta is a vertically integrated agro-industrial holding operating in eight regions of Ukraine.
