Pablo Komo

@pablos_eye

I am not a man, I am Komo. Ex-newspaper photographer turned mental health social worker. All views expressed here are my own.

Joined May 2013

66 Following

17 Followers

197 Posts

pablos_eye retweeted

Maxi

@AllForProgress_

1 day ago

There is a furnace in St Helens that has been alight, in one form or another, since before your great-grandparents were born. Glassmaking is one of the oldest things this country does well; they were blowing it on Wearside in the seventh century, and it was a St Helens firm that gave the world the float-glass process every modern window depends on. Now the government has found a way to tax it toward the exit. The mechanism is the packaging levy, Extended Producer Responsibility if you want the civil-service name for it, and it charges a manufacturer by the weight of the packaging it puts on the market. Glass is heavy. Plastic is light. So a material made from sand, soda ash and a little limestone, one that can be melted down and remade without end and never stops being recyclable, is billed as though it were the enemy of the planet, while the throwaway plastic beside it on the shelf gets off lighter for being flimsier. The numbers give the game away. Glass is around 5% of the packaging market and carries some 27% of the entire EPR charge. The GMB puts 4,752 glassmaking jobs in the firing line. The brewers reckon it is costing their trade £124 million a year and adding about 6p to every half-litre bottle, which you settle at the bar without ever being told why. There was, we were promised, a reset in June to bring the glass charge down; Whitehall's own working moves the figure by around 1%. A rounding error, handed over as a rescue. It takes a peculiar kind of talent to assemble a thing like this. A tax raised in the name of the environment, falling hardest on the one everyday material that is endlessly reusable and harmless in the ground, and lightest on the stuff that chokes the rivers we are also instructed to mourn. A British glassworks already pays some of the dearest industrial energy in the developed world to hold its furnaces at 1,500 degrees; now it is sent a bill for the crime of making something built to last. A competent government would do the obvious thing and price packaging by the harm it does once it is thrown away, not by what it weighs on the scales, and a glassmaker in Yorkshire or on Merseyside would wake to find the state was on the side of the thing it makes. Progress has written that programme out in full, because knowing what to do was never the hard part. So if you make things for a living, or you have watched an industry you were proud of taxed and lectured into the ground and felt the anger that earns, do something heavier than feel it. The furnaces will not keep themselves open, and the formula will not un-write itself because you were annoyed online. Time to help build something that's going to change the picture.

532

240

31K

Pablo Komo

@pablos_eye

Who to follow

Last Seen Users on Sotwe

Trends for you

Most Popular Users