Thursday March 17, 2022, Haopa port, resulting from the merger of the ports of Le Havre, Rouen and Paris, announced a new industrial implementation project: a giant candy. A project led by the company Al Khaleej Sugar (AKS), originally from Dubai, which wishes to settle in the industrial platform located in Grand-Couronne-Moulineaux, near Rouen. Enough to create hundreds of jobs, but also to worry elected officials and residents.
This gigantic project for a large sugar refinery near Rouen will create jobs
With a view to reindustrialising France, the project has everything to seduce: an investment of several hundred million euros, the rehabilitation of an industrial wasteland as well as the promise of nearly 300 direct jobs and several thousand indirect jobs. AKS has chosen, for the installation of its sugar factory, a 75 ha platform left free after the departure of the car manufacturer Renault, in 2020.
This new establishment, in Grand-Couronne-Moulineaux, near Rouen, would be intended to produce sugar for export. It would thus benefit from the rail and sea freight connections specific to the site. But its nature, a candy, worries: the operation of such an installation is not free from nuisances. Especially given the scale of the project, which provides for production of between 650,000 and 850,000 tonnes of white sugar per year.
The plant should occupy a platform of 75 ha – © illustration image, iStock.
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Traffic, odors, pollution… Ecologists are stepping up against the project of the company Al Khaleej Sugar (AKS)
Several elected environmentalists have taken up the file, relates Actu.frcriticizing a project that goes against ecology. Thus, according to the EELV Normandie group, to supply the sugar refinery with raw material, some 100,000 heavy goods vehicles per year will have to circulate, not to mention the use of nearly 50,000 ha of land for the cultivation of sugar beet. However, the latter is accompanied by the massive use of pesticides, and in particular of neonicotinoids. In February 2022, beet cultivation obtained a derogation concerning the use of these pesticides that are harmful to bees.
Residents are also concerned: the manufacture of white sugar is usually accompanied by bad odors and pollution. Which, for elected environmentalists, seems an aberration in the aftermath of the latest alarming IPCC report which gives the world three years to reduce its emissions before it is too late…
The company Al Khaleej Sugar (AKS), originally from Dubai, wants to set up a giant sugar factory near Rouen – © illustration image, iStock.
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