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?
I am old enough to remember when we went to plastic from wood e.g. straws, paper packaging etc. to save the planet because we were chopping down too many trees.
I really doubt it has a lower carbon footprint. ven when yes this will be a typical example of working on a small scale only. For instance using leftover wood. But on a large scale you don’t have enough leftover wood so you have to cut down trees. And something tells me cutting trees is for more destructive than a plastic bottle.
John Flint, National Wealth Fund CEO, said:
“We need to recycle more and unlock the growth potential of the circular economy. That requires sophisticated, long-term investment, both in infrastructure and packaging innovation. Exciting technological advancements like Pulpex are a great example of that potential. But they need catalytic investment to scale and commercialise.
In other words, the private sector is too canny to put their money into a madcap scheme and so taxpayers will be forced to put some of their hard-earned money into the scheme, instead.
We get our milk in plastic bags (3 x 1.33 l size), which are recyclable where and when local authorities decide to do that, otherwise they can be burned (a few municipalities in Ontario do that, with SOA furnaces that are also co-gen).
It is noted that recycling will no longer be municipal soon, so we will see how that evolves. And soon we may loose the nut zero crown in Ottawa.