Roquette’s commitment to the environment is most clearly in evidence in its development of techniques to limit its requirements for water. It is achieving this by recycling the water needed for production processes.

To extract the maximum benefit from available technologies and to overcome the specific challenges at each of our plants a variety of processes have been developed within the Group :

• Potato protein recovery by flocculation (a Roquette patent).
• Making the most of starch processing water through its use in agricultural fertilisers (at Vecquemont).
• The use of by-products for animal feeds.
• Methods of extracting hydrogenation catalysts from effluents.
• High-efficiency purification units ; the most important one is at Lestrem.

Each purification unit is monitored. The principal effluent parameters are measured continuously : samples are taken from discharge points and analysed daily in Roquette’s laboratories or by approved agencies.