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England’s glassblowing industry under threat from green levies
Threats to northern-based sector could prove embarrassing for Andy Burnham
The British glass industry could become “No. 10 North’s first major test”, said the Financial Times. A new government green levy introduced last year has put thousands of jobs at risk in the “heavily northern-based sector”, creating a headache for Prime Minister Andy Burnham.
‘Polluter pays’
The Extended Producer Responsibility scheme is based on “the ’polluter pays’ principle to help local councils with the cost of recycling”, said The Times. It makes businesses responsible for the collection and recycling costs of the goods they put on the market, including packaging. Because the fees are calculated according to weight, glass is facing disproportionate costs compared to cardboard and plastic.
The policy, drawn up by the Department for the Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs, is expected to raise around £1.6 billion a year. But it comes at an “acute time” for the glass sector, industry body British Glass told The Times.
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The policy is making the British glass industry more expensive than the cheap imports from China and Turkey which are flooding the market. Five of the six main glass packaging manufacturers are based overseas, so the UK “has to be attractive to foreign owners as an economy but also from a policy point of view”, a spokesperson said.
Call to reconsider
Breweries and the pub industry have “long urged a rethink” on the levy, which they claim offers a perverse incentive for retailers to opt for less sustainable plastic packaging, said the Financial Times. There is also support for amending the scheme within Labour: the Business Secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, is among the cabinet ministers who have “privately been pushing for changes to the policy”.
“Too many take glass for granted”, wrote Brian Leishman, the Labour MP for Alloa and Grangemouth, on Politics Home, but this is a £1.3 billion industry “supporting well over 100,000 jobs”, and it’s “hugely important for the government to reconsider pressing ahead” with these worrying regulations.
Action needs to come swiftly, said Labour List. “Stand next to a glass furnace for a few minutes, feel the heat, listen to the noise and one thing becomes obvious”: this is not an industry “that can simply switch off at the end of the day” or “wait for market conditions to improve”.
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Chas Newkey-Burden has been part of The Week Digital team for more than a decade and a journalist for 25 years, starting out on the irreverent football weekly 90 Minutes, before moving to lifestyle magazines Loaded and Attitude. He was a columnist for The Big Issue and landed a world exclusive with David Beckham that became the weekly magazine’s bestselling issue. He now writes regularly for The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, Metro, FourFourTwo and the i news site. He is also the author of a number of non-fiction books.
