Can British Industries be Green?

Is British Industry Green?

Cheese, a staple food for many British households, but the industry that makes it needs work. British cheese requires milk, and milk requires livestock—large amounts of livestock. Livestock can produce 250 – 500 litres of methane a day, methane being 28 times more effective at trapping heat than CO₂, making it a much more potent greenhouse gas. The U.K. is estimated to have produced 27.9 million tonnes of methane in 2023, the vast majority of which came from cows. These livestock farms also require food for the animals, and the farms producing that food need a huge amount of land. Seventy per cent of land in the U.K. is used for agriculture, the majority being for animal farming. All that agricultural land means there are few wild areas left, wild areas that are important for sequestering carbon. Further, cheese isn’t manufactured locally. Milk from the livestock is shipped from all over to a single location, manufactured, then shipped again to stores all over. All the shipping, as well as the factories themselves, produce great amounts of greenhouse gases. Local artisan cheese is a viable alternative, usually made from local milk, which limits shipping emissions, making it more sustainable and keeping jobs and profits local. Artisan farms, however, are dwindling; supporting their business will keep the more sustainable industry afloat.

Steel. In the U.K., steel is the largest industrial emitter of carbon dioxide due to the current methods of its production. In order to be manufactured for commercial use, factories use a blast furnace to create iron. The blast furnace uses extreme heat to combine coke (carbon-packed fuel), iron ore, and limestone to produce a molten slag that then gets refined into steel. Refining steel in this way emits 2.32 tonnes of CO₂ per tonne of steel. Additionally, massive amounts of water are needed for current steel processing, mainly for the purpose of cooling.

There are greener means of production, such as new electric arc furnaces that are ideal for refining scrap metal and produce a fraction of the carbon emissions. However, the electric arc furnaces don’t need as many workers to use, and their mass use would also mean mass loss of jobs, especially detrimental in places that rely heavily on steelworks like Port Talbot. Steel could indeed be greener, but at great cost that will require careful planning and attention to minimise.

Forests being green is seemingly a given, but what many think of as “forests” in the U.K. aren’t forests at all but plantations. The U.K. was once covered in forests—real forests that were healthy, biodiverse, and hosts to balanced ecosystems. However, forests of that kind were almost entirely removed to make room for timber plantations and livestock. Trees planted in timber plantations are non-native plants selected because they grow tall and fast; they are also often planted too close together. These kinds of timber plantations out-compete the native trees by blocking them from sunlight, with insufficient sunlight reaching the ground, meaning not much of anything can grow there either. The timber trees also do not have the structure to support bird and squirrel nests. All of this creates a monoculture where the timber trees are living and thriving, but nothing else is. In order to restore green forests in the U.K., many of the timber trees are being pulled down and uprooted, mimicking storm paths and creating dead wood that will feed microorganisms, fungi, and insects, who will in turn be food for the new forest. Timber trees are being pulled down not only by industrial means but also more traditional means like logging horses.

The timber trees are not the only factor preventing green forests; there is also the problem of overgrazing, particularly in the remains of the Caledonian forest in Scotland. In the late 1700s, over 100,000 native Highland people were removed from their homes and forced to abandon their way of life; this is when the sheep farms moved in. Sheep farming created an environment where there were suddenly tens of thousands of sheep living on land that was never meant to support that kind of industry. Further, native wolves were hunted to extinction, and the resulting boom in deer population has been kept large to support the modern hunting industry. All the sheep and deer on the land overgraze the area, making it difficult for the natural forests to regenerate. On top of all this, many promises by governments and organisations to plant more trees in an effort to reduce carbon are fulfilled by creating these monocultures that are nowhere near as effective as natural forests. Supporting rewilding efforts like that of Mossy Earth, Arkaig Community Forest, and Northwoods Rewilding Network helps the organisations restore forests to their natural green state.