Reuse: Letter to Gordon Brown

To Rt Hon Gordon Brown MP, UK Government Chancellor

Dear Mr. Brown,

Is there any way that tax subsidies to the UK film industry could be coupled with requirements for them to sharpen up their poor environmental record? Although it may appear that companies like Warner Brothers have environmental policies, they all use tiers of sub-contractors to mask their true environmental performance. At the bottom of the sub-contract pile there are little or no environmental controls. The waste is pretty bad. For example, when the film 'Saving Private Ryan' was made, production companies scoured Europe for salvaged materials to build an entire French town at Leavesden studios. When filming finished we requested that they should allow the salvage of those materials. Instead, as far as we are aware, at the end of filming they sent the materials to landfill. But this is not all.

If reclaiming and reusing materials is a government priority, could salvage companies have some recognition of that in the UK tax and subsidy structure? Recycling and destruction is being subsidised with billions of pounds of taxpayer's money. Reclaiming and reuse gets no help. It is not a level playing field. Consequently fifty per cent more is being destroyed now than was ten year's ago. The embodied energy of reusable building materials destroyed annually is now enough to heat 10 million UK homes. Ten years ago it was only enough to heat 2 million homes. So it is not surprising that hitting emissions targets is proving tricky. All this has eluded the government's experts, mainstream construction, the green and the heritage building lobbies, despite our trying to get it on their agenda. Hence my letter to you.

Yours sincerely,
Thornton Kay
Salvo Llp