From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
h/t Ian Magness
It’s only taxpayers’ money!!
From the Telegraph:
Britain’s National Wealth Fund, which is fully owned by the Treasury, on Wednesday announced a £43.5m investment into Cambridgeshire-based start-up Pulpex, which makes recyclable water bottles out of wood pulp.
The investment will help finance Pulpex’s plan to build its first ever manufacturing plant, near Glasgow, which is expected to produce 50m wooden bottles each year and create 35 jobs in Scotland.
The wood-based bottles have a lower carbon footprint than plastic or glass and Ian Murray, the Scottish Secretary, said the investment would “aid the decarbonisation of our packaging industry and help accelerate our net zero goals as we drive delivery of clean power by 2030”.
The Scottish National Investment Bank, which is fully owned by the Scottish Government, is investing £10m alongside the National Wealth Fund and Pulpex ultimately hopes to raise £62m.
Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, hailed the investment as “welcome news” that was “creating jobs, sustainable growth and opportunity in Scotland”.
For some reason the Telegraph treats this as a serious idea, and not the scandalous waste of taxpayer money.
£62 million for 35 jobs? That’s nearly £2 million a job. It’s utterly crazy.
And Pulpex will need will need to chop down a lot of trees, which will do far more damage to the environment that a bit of carbon dioxide from glass or plastic.
The whole idea is flawed anyway – who is actually going to bother recycling these wooden bottles anyway?
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It may stop or slow the burning of books in the UK for heat in the winter??
/sarc
Burning? Books are where they’d get the pulp from!
Certain religious text’s notwithstanding……..
Judge: I find you guilty of severe religious hatred.
Wee Jimmy: But, m’lud, I was only burning the book to keep warm.
This is yet another example of the utter cluelessness of the British government. They simply don’t understand how businesses operate. Private companies are run to make a profit because that is how they stay in business. If this project was financially viable, it would be able to get private financing, not subsidies from the British taxpayer.
Someone in the management team well connected with the SNP?
Try as we may, we Yanks can never hope to compete with the UK on daft schemes.
Don’t knock pouring a woody of milk over your wife’s Honey Bunches of Oats in the morning.
Milk…from a woody…sounds positively scandalous
🤣
Sadly I think you are wrong about that.
Clueless because the product already exists.
Tetra Pak:
Tetra Paks are made from a combination of materials, including:
75% paperboard, made from wood fibres
20% polyethene, a type of plastic used to protect against moisture and adhesion to aluminium foil
5% aluminium, used for its barrier properties to prevent oxygen and light from reaching the contents
Dipsticks.
Wood has been used for centuries to store liquid. In the form of barrels or canteens.
Those containers were carved or cut from intact wood. They were NOT made from wood that was pulped and then glued back together. Think “toxic chemicals.”
Ah but it is ‘saving the planet’ so money is no object.
It’s a well-known fact that it’s only businesses that no entrepreneur will fund which are forced to crawl to organizations like the NWF. Despite the fact that the business community has assessed them as “losers”, government always seems willing to support such crackpot ideas with taxpayers’ money. Particularly a Labour government.
I’m prepared to bet good money negotiations were begun under the Tories.
The last Tory government were pinkos in blue suits…
Boris Johnson was the best leader Labour ever had. That’s why the British voted the Tories out of power.
Drax. At least “renewable” forest product biomass would be used locally, instead of imported from America.
Did they say what adhesive they were going to use? Pulp based containers require some sort of polymer for structure and to prevent the product from leaking out. If it was from the wood pulp or forest product, that isn’t a “green” process. If it wasn’t from the wood, maybe it was a good petro-based polymer.
Anyone unfortunate enough to have had a hospital stay in the last 25 years or so might recogize these bottles — used for bedpans and collection of other bodily fluids. Yummy.
Not to mention the coatings to make them fluid resistant.
He did mention it: “and to prevent the product from leaking out”.
Why the exaggerations? It’s not £62 million of tax payers money. Assuming the Telegraph is correct it’s 43.5 million of taxpayer investment. The 62 million figure is what they hope to ultimately hope to raise.
And these are not “wooden bottles” any more than cardboard milk cartons are wooden. Does Homewood object to bottles made from sand or oil?
Bellman,
There’s an extra £10m up-front from the Scottish government (so, effectively the English taxpayer as Scotland is bust) too. Whether £40m or £60m, however, it’s completely mad and the business owners, I’m sure, cannot believe their luck. Talk about laughing all the way to the bank. It’s not as if the bottles will last forever, if indeed they can ever be used for holding food-grade products more than once. Even if it isn’t intended to be a scam, I’ll speculate that the company will go out of business in a short number of years, with the money long disappeared into the owners’ pockets. Yet another net zero fiasco.
and who buy them with tetra pack being well established certified food safe and accept UHT treatment
seems to me that is the “business plan” of all these innovative green companies. Can anyone spell solyndra??
There is no such thing as taxpayer ‘Investment’.
It’s called public spending (or waste) of taxpayers money.
Flushing people’s hard earned cash down (eco) toilet
Your point on cardboard milk cartons is well taken. Cardboard is, indeed, made of wood pulp, and these apparently used wax to make them waterproof. I remember how the “wooden” spout would become quite soggy from drinking milk directly from the carton in grade school. This has already been invented, used, then discarded.
Since you mention cardboard milk cartons, why invent a new process. If the consumers wanted their water in plant fiber-based containers, go with an already proven process.
Thank you for helping to demonstrate just what a waste this entire idea is.
In the 1960s we had a pretty good system for glass where milkbottles were returned to the dairies via the milkman, and drinks bought in bottles had 3d (thruppence) deposit on them, meaning if you returned them you got the thruppence back on the empty bottle. We used to go round collecting them to get the cash.
Of course, that’s all changed now but… it did work. And now the major leap forward is yet another way of chopping down those, er, very necessary carbon sinks known as trees.
Someone is going to trouser a lot of [wasted] money out of this. This one is for Ed Miliband… Some arboreal DEI
When I was a cop working in Glasgow in the 70’s/80’s we collected discarded glass Irn Bru bottles when out on patrol in cars and cashed them in at 10p each at Christmas. The lockers in the mess room were filled with bottles, which paid for a shift booze-up.
Nuff said.
No wonder you could never catch the robbers 🤣
They were drunker than us. 😁
Milk in glass containers tasted better too.
That’s because it was full fat not skinny fat
Ahhh! Happy days! Find two bottles and return them and we kids could buy a Crunchie or a Mars Bar for the princely sum of 6d (a.k.a. “a tanner”).
When I was 7 (ish) I used to visit my elderly neighbours, collect their empty bottles and get the deposit back so I had some pocket money, in addition to my bread round from age 9.
I did this until I was 16 and left school.
Good lesson in that song, for those willing to listen.
Plus, the milk bottles were collected and distributed using a battery-powered vehicle recharged overnight at the local dairy.
I remember them; they must have been seriously heavy – all those lead-acid batteries…
Sprayed with something on the inside they assure us is food-safe to make them waterproof.
Not yet cheaper than glass, not able to take carbonated drinks, nor hot fill. If ever.
So expensive, yet more food price inflation, and only suitable for a proportion of the container market, thus making glass/plastic more expensive as they are squeezed out of market share.
And competing with Drax for those mysterious infinite sources of waste wood too?
Plastic carrier bags were invented by a Swedish guy in the US (from memory) to reduce the use of pulped trees for paper grocery bags, as people were concerned at the number of trees being cut down for that purpose.
Shoppers used fabric bags but there are sanitary concerns but there wasn’t an alternative. Paper bags came along and solved the issue of fabric bags, they went away and paper was king. Environmentalist decided that cutting down trees for paper bags was bad so convinced government to ban paper bags and to use plastic bags instead. Environmentalist decided plastic bags were bad for the environment and convinced government to ban plastic bags and we can use fabric bags instead cue up people getting sick from reusing unsanitary bags…Saga of my state. FYI this isn’t all at the state level, some of this is at city/county level but encouraged state wide. For example the state did not ban paper bags what they did was allow for cities/counties to ban paper bags and for those who don’t ban them the stores were told to charge us for the bags. Some stores “charge” for the bag but pay the charge (of course we are still paying for them) but those stores are rare most just charge for the bag. Prior to the law no store charged for a bag.Even worse the bags have gotten so thin you have to layer at least two to keep them from ripping and three is even better.
Ideally the wood would be sourced from the South Island of New Zealand. (Closest forest to the exact opposite side of the earth from Glasgow). So as not to compete with Drax.
Ah, the infinite creativity of the Green Grifters!
Same disaster as those eco straws. Don’t try to drink hot chocolate with them.
You get two uses from the bottle; drink whatever is in it, then toss it in the fireplace for a brief few minutes of warmth. Solid investment.
More heat in polyethylene bottle by far and no smoke
Do the chemicals used to stick the pulp together and waterproof the container make it difficult to burn empties and would any toxins be produced and chemicals damage chimney liners if you could burn them? Burning chipboard is a problem for those reasons.
If you are allowed to have a fireplace.
Don’t those bottles have a plastic liner?
Welcome to the world of Alice in Wonderland principles that now guide the UK’s government spending.
Most of us that need a casual liquid container either have one they hold in the cupboard usually made from plastic or metal,. Or, we rinse out one of the soft drink bottles we all invariably buy from the fuel station when we add the meal deal option to our fill up spend.
Who in this day and age would expect a market to develop for wooden bottles? If the thing was going to be kept for repeated use it introduce so many health risks, it is akin to revisiting the early 19th century.
Looking for the positives as I always try to do, it will certainly limit the influence of the green zealots. They will be the ones opting for the ‘wood is good’ bottles so they won’t be around that much longer due to the ever present Darwin filters woven into our society…..
Next thing you know, we’ll be going back to tin cans with lead seals. Hello Franklin Expedition.
The bottles will, after usage, end up in the wood burner, because by then proper logs will have been outlawed.
I do hope that the old plastic bottle factory will be properly blown up as is the protocol guarding against any backsliding!
On a similar note and yes a pom doing it
This pom turns up a science institute where I used to work claiming he had invented a special process to extract hemp fiber as strong as carbon fiber. He was very convincing and had samples,well we tested them well within the range for hemp fiber both on a cross sectional area and on a mass basis . He did not like the answer so went elsewhere but our contacts there told us same result
It appears that this sort of crap has been in the pom population for many years, we later heard a rumor he had blown the family fortune.
There must be a stupid factor in the water to come half way round the world to try and get the answer he wanted
What did Einstein say about doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different answer
Pom?
Brit
For some reason, milk (and orange juice and other liquid products) already comes in “wood-based” containers called cartons. There must be some reason that water comes in recyclable plastic bottles … or in my house from a faucet.
Microsoft Copilot tells us,
“Potentially” is carrying a lot of water here …
Don’t get me started on recycling. Ok, I’m already started.
Locally, they will only take #1 and #2 plastics. Which is maybe 1% of the plastics we generate. So it’s just about completely useless. We have to throw it all away.
Round our way they’ll take #5 and #6 as well, but not the ones in between…
There is no limit on craziness when other people have unfettered access to other people’s money.
I can’t imagine anything worse than drinking from a wooden bottle. I may lack imagination or something…
Be careful not to get any splinters in your lips.
From the article:…who is actually going to bother recycling these wooden bottles…”
With no petrol or electricity to drive your car back to the recycle center and no gas to heat your home these bottles may never get recycled only help warm the house.
If the wood bottles are burned for energy recovery will that be considered “green” energy since that is the claim switching to wood bottles?
Serious health issue.
How can you sterilize the wooden bottle?
snip, snip?
Took me a minute …
Fire
One problem with recycling wood fibers, is that each time through, the fibers get shorter, as the long fibers get broken.
We’ve already seen that problem when trying to recycle paper.
The UK government’s calculators appear to work in reverse. Who could possibly have foreseen the collapse of the certain winner, OneWeb, a £400m spaff? Except everyone.
We can see the Sun headline already “Wooden Bottle Maker Springs Money Leak”
To all Gilligan’s Island fans out there…..
I seem to recall somewhere that, on the old Gilligan’s Island television series, they wanted the actors to use real coconut shells for drinking beverages on the set during filming. Unfortunately, it did not take them very long to realize that the coconut shell leaked when used. So, the idea obviously had to be dropped.
They ultimately had to resort to using fake manufactured coconut shells. I will hazard a guess that they were made from either plastic or glass. LOL.
The fake cups were actually made of ceramics…
Gilligan’s Island coconut cup…. Movie/TV Memorabilia | Lot #2117 | Heritage Auctions
Oh this is fine. The last time I looked at a square of MDF, I thought to myself, self, this would make an awesome bottle…
Moving on. According to their website, the weight of a 500ml bottle of theirs is 27g. The average weight of a plastic bottle according to a for sale ad on IndiaMart, is 11-15g. So immediately you’ve doubled the weight, which will impact transport costs and create additional emissions. There’s no mention of plastic lining in the main blurb:
But wonder over to the FAQ and there’s this gem:
Food-grade coating of… what, exactly?
But wait, there’s more;
So these “wooden” bottles will be going to landfill just like their plastic counterparts.
Regarding the energy used to make the bottles;
I call bullshirt.
No mention that I could see on how these wood fibre bottles perform when dropped. But, you won’t have to worry about your carbonated soft drink of chioce exploding out of one of these because…
So there you go. They might be expected to produce 50m bottles a year, but fork knows who’d bother buying them. This isn’t a waste of taxpayer money, its forking theft.
We could have “beer from the wood” again!
Government spending taxpayer money on unproven technologies is always a bad idea. That’s a terrible user of government power and money. However dismissing a technological innovation because it sounds unusual is not brilliant, either.
PepsiCo has invested millions in Pulpex to develop a method to bottle water, and presumably other liquids and foods, using materials and processes that have a reduced impact on the environment. That’s a good idea, as long as it proves to be as good as they claim. 8 billion humans generate a lot of packaging waste and the more we can cost-competetively reduce that waste, recycle it, biodegrade it into soil or other useful and reusable material, and create it from raw materials that are “renewable,” like wood, the better off we’ll be. The packaging industry is constantly working on ways to improve, just like the oil and gas industry. It remains to be seen if this one will take, but it’s a worthwhile endeavor. Just not with taxpayer money.
The Telegraph is a shadow of it’s former self. Apparently run by children.
No, that’s the Grauniad.
And are they full of toxic chemicals that leach into the liquid, the way paper straws are?