Incinerator fears

I came across this really sad letter in the Messenger (see link below) of someone describing the long term health impacts of working in industry, which led to the early death of her husband who had worked for many years at Irlam Steel. The letter has been written to express concerns about Biomass Incinerators and the potential risk to health posed by such installations.  Peel Holdings are planning such a facility at Davyhulme near Barton Bridge. At one level these installations provide a source of renewable energy - an attractive proposition to politicians seeking support on a green ticket. However, there are many concerns about the efficiency and health impacts of biomass incinerators. The emissions from this plant are likely to spread over a large populated area including Irlam and Cadishead.

Air pollution does not respect local authority boundaries, so this proposal which is being considered by Trafford Council, is as much of a concern for Salford residents.  And when you start to look at evidence from around the world,we perhaps should be concerned as this quote from Oregon suggests:

"Burning biomass is ... a dirty air problem. Even with air pollution controls, these plants will collectively pump ton after ton of toxins into the air every day -- chemicals that will rain down on the neighborhoods closest to the plant. A number of professional medical societies are warning the public that breathing sooty emissions from biomass incinerators is known as the most dangerous form of pollution and a significant health risk. The Oregon Chapter of the American Lung Association is predicting that patients, particularly children with asthma, respiratory and cardiac ailments, will experience increases in the incidence of respiratory problems. These diseases can be worsened by small micro pollutants, the type of pollution that will increase with the proliferation of biomass plants in Oregon" (Oregon Live, 2010).

Contact your local councillor!

Sources:

• Incinerator fears (From Messenger Newspapers)
• Residents meet over controversial plans

No 6 Sloop Irlam

Samuel Walters is famous for this paintings of 19th Century ships, including No 6 Sloop named after our town 'Irlam'.  The vessel was built in 1831, but was wrecked in 1852 after running around near Warren Point in Northern Ireland.  Would be good to see some way of commemorating Irlam's maritime heritage, perhaps some postcards. The painting itself is held by the Merseyside Maritime Museum.

The Container Storeroom

Industrial storage may not seem like the key to globalisation, but the shipping container has revolutionised the global economy, enabling the safe transit of bulk volume across huge distances, reducing the cost of transport from 30% of the price of a product to just 1%. Shipping containers are also used as homes, retail space and even as a debating space during Manchester's Future Everything festival in 2010.

An obvious extension of the container's internal logic is to reuse these ubiquitous boxes, not only for storage en-route, but as storage in lieu of permanent warehousing at ports or at factory sites. This provides companies with added locational flexibility ensuring components only hit the factory floor as and when needed. The implication is that business can save on valuable floor space, which would normally be used to store stuff.

It also means that the traditional landscape of the port has changed radically. Shorn of its romanticism, the modern port has few cranes, warehouses or even dockers. Rather they resemble the port facility at Irlam, which comprises a single lonely crane surrounded by containers and an access road.

Port Strategy - Storeroom key

How manufacturing really works

You may remember from geography lessons at school how national economies are broken up in 3-4 sectors - Primary (farming, mining), Secondary (manufacturing), Services (finance, shopping etc) - and maybe an elusive Quaternary Sector - which I could never get my head around - basically all the stuff which wasn't in any of the first three sectors.

The problem with this analysis is that it is complete bunkum. The reality in a globally interconnected world, is that vast global corporate empires effectively sew together all these sectors into one business network, rendering their division meaningless, but also making analysis much more difficult to interpret.

The case of Irlam based RTS is a case in point. At first sight, this innovative company makes stuff. It manufactures robots for industry, including those clover bomb disposal robots which have help saved the lives of many service people and citizens. So according to our Sectoral model - we should place it in the secondary sector.

In a world without international financial services, this perhaps would be the case. But as I've often observed on this blog, the local and the global are connected in dynamic and complex ways. RTS are simply seen as a vehicle for raising share prices and the capital values of shareholder portfolios across the world. It is now seen appropriate that RTS no longer makes stuff the way it does, and does things differently in order to extract further surplus value from the local, another victim of the vague Alternative Investment Market. And so RTS is no longer RTS, but Hephaestus Holdings, whereas the actual making of stuff will pass to a new company Entoligi.

As an ordinary employee you make think making profit has to do with the actual quality and demand for the product, marketing and efficiency on the factory floor. But the reality is that shareholder returns are by in large made through acquisitions and mergers on an international scale through City dealers. As an ordinary employee you will be aware that the consequences of the constant changes in ownership is restructuring and job losses.

Hephaestus Holdings is another one of those global companies who are notoriously difficult to pin down. It is a new company, formed in 2005, based in the US where it runs 15 subsidiary businesses in the engineering sector in the mid-West region.

According to Greek mythology Hephaestus was cast down from Mount Olympus by Zeus, crippling his legs, who fashioned magical contrivances for the gods, but cut a rather comic figure as the cuckcolded husband of Aphrodite. I'm not drawing any analogies but it is a strange name for a company.

Source: RTS unveils break-up plans - Manchester Evening News

Irlam - International Centre for the Denial of Human Rights

This weekend saw Manchester United play at Stoke City, which for the Guardian newspaper raised the spectre of the infamous incident at the Railway Pub whereby GMP used a spurious Dispersal Order to forcibly move a group of innocent Stoke City fans.  This event has raised questions about civil liberties in Britain and the denial of basic human rights to ordinary people.  It would seem the moment you don a football scarf in this country, you are unwittingly signing away these rights.  All this is justified by the police, who make the case that if they deny a handful of football hooligans gaining entry into a football stadium, the denial of rights of hundreds of innocent people is a piece of liberty forgoing for a bit more safety.