My first reaction to this claim — that wood-based bottles have a lower carbon footprint than plastic or glass — is "Show your work." Let's see the numbers because, as always, you can color me skeptical. The claim is that these wooden bottles have a lower carbon footprint; OK, then, let's see the proponents of this silly idea quantify the carbon footprints of wooden, plastic, and glass bottles. //

And what's crazy is that the Telegraph reports this so uncritically. Nowhere does this publication attempt to justify spending £43.5 million — that's about $55 million in American cash — for 35 jobs. And that's only the beginning; these things always seem to end up costing more than planned.

$55 million for 35 jobs — that's a bit over a million and a half per job. We must also come back to the inevitable economics statement: If this were a viable business model, it wouldn't require a government subsidy. Let this company make its case to private investors, to commercial banks, and if there's a market for wooden bottles, best of luck to them. //

Also, trees are carbon sinks. Whether one is worried about climate change or not, trees are still big carbon sinks. They take carbon from the atmosphere in the form of CO2 and convert it to sugars that are essentially food for the tree. How many trees will these wooden bottles cost?

There are other issues. Can these bottles be reused? Wood — cellulose — is porous. Can these bottles be cleaned for reuse? //

Random US Citizen
11 hours ago
The real question—as always—is who benefits. If you dug around the books of this boondoggle, I can almost guarantee you’d find kickbacks, campaign donations, and other assorted money laundering schemes putting a significant portion of that $40+ million into the pockets of grifters. These things always fail, because they’re designed to fail. And all that money will have mysteriously disappeared never to be recovered. It happens every time. ///

This is a fancy way of promoting boxed water Mar of paper