Taxpayers' cash ploughed into wooden bottles in net zero drive
National Wealth Fund invests £43.5m into start-up Pulpex’s plan for Glaswegian manufacturing plant
Millions of pounds of taxpayers’ cash is being ploughed into a company that makes wooden drinking bottles as part of Labour’s push towards net zero.
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”.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/02/19/taxpayer-cash-ploughed-wooden-bottles-labours-net-zero/
= new reply since forum marked as read
I'm sorry I kind of jumped on you. "Taxpayer funds ploughed into" is, to me, a RW trope, often used to introduce a story about a government study of something that on the surface and to the layman sound utterly stupid. It's a way to denigrate basic science, in many cases. My internal bells went off.
I like the idea of bottles made from trees, but there are many practical problems to be solved before such a thing will ever be on my grocery store shelves. Which is why, I guess, we must plough all those taxpayers' dollars into it. 
