Mahendra Pratap Singh, Mahendra Kumar Yadav, Ashok Garg, Seema Paroha and Tushar Gosavi
National Sugar Institute, Kanpur, India
A method for producing white sugar from sugarcane juice is explored, focusing on reducing the use of sulphur dioxide in the clarification process. Sugar factories in India and many other countries, commonly use the double sulphitation process to produce plantation white sugar for direct consumption. However, challenges such as sulphur price volatility, environmental concerns, reducing sugar formation, and process inefficiencies have prompted the need for alternatives. Adding SO₂ directly into the cane juice is not a good practice as some of the SO₂ escapes to the atmosphere and the process is dependent on imported raw granular sulphur. Given the labour, machinery and energy required in sulphur melting and burning as well as the health risk involved in handling of SO₂ gas, sodium metabisulfite may be a suitable alternative. The proposed method using sodium metabisulpite simplifies the traditional process by eliminating the use of raw granular sulphur and its associated equipment and machinery. It is available in both powder and liquid forms, with SO₂ content ranging from approximately 64–66% (powder) and 23–24% (liquid), as reported. This substitution removes the need for live steam used in sulphur melting, as well as labour and machinery required for sulphur dioxide gas generation and handling. Which offers a more efficient, environment friendly, and cost-effective approach to white sugar production. The result obtained from the trials of sodium metabisulphite conducted in the laboratories of commercial sugar factories were almost comparable to the standard double sulphitation process in terms of quality of clear juice obtained such as Brix, Pol%, Purity, RS/1000 Bx, colour removal from raw juice to clear juice, transmittance and turbidity removal.