Port Talbot is also home to a polluting Tata Steel factory. “This is a shithole, but it’s the best shithole,” they say in town

The steel mill staff is like family. Literal. “You either work there yourself or are married to someone who works there,” says Barbara Evans. She has been working at the Tata factory in Port Talbot, a town in Wales, for 29 years. Her husband works there. Her brother-in-law. And until a few months ago, her father-in-law.

But her children? Not that one. When her daughter had to choose a course of study three or four years ago, she made it clear to her parents that she was not going in the industrial, technical direction. “Not a chance,” she said, because the way things are going now is not sustainable. So she already saw that then.”

Indeed, the future of the Tata factory, located in a bay on the south coast of Wales, is uncertain. The Indian owners of Tata Steel and the British Trade Minister recently announced have made agreements about greening measures. The government would add 500 million pounds (about 575 million euros) to a 750 million pound investment from Tata, to make the transition from the current two traditional coal-fired blast furnaces to one electric smelting furnace. It would be the annual amount of CO₂reduce UK emissions by 1.5 percent – ​​the Tata factory is one of the country’s biggest polluters.

Only: this was calculated outside the unions. They are still highly organized within the steel sector and nothing was asked of them. The innovations would result in the disappearance of around three thousand of the total of eight thousand jobs at Tata Steel VK. The vast majority of the redundancies would occur in Port Talbot, where Tata has about four thousand employees. Angry reactions from the unions resulted and Tata held an official press conference about the plans until further notice.

works close to Tata SteelGayle Parker Many elderly people live here, so the health risks will not be too bad

Since the announcement, unrest and uncertainty have filled the air in Port Talbot. “Everyone just talks about this. People are worried about their mortgage, about their children, about their future,” says Barbara Evans, who works as a manager at the energy supply department and is a representative of the Community trade union. Just last week she had job interviews with external candidates, but that felt completely pointless with all those jobs on the line. “This morning I received an email from the HR department asking whether we can offer so-and-so a job. I just thought, why should we?”

Tata in Port Talbot also emits PAHs.

Brown-orange fabric

The town of Port Talbot breathes steel. The coffee shop where Evans wants to meet is called the Steel Town Coffee Company. The barbershop a little further away: Steel Barbers. And behind the windows in the shopping street hang A4 sheets in which small entrepreneurs express their support for the unions: ‘Support UK Steel.’

Very different from the Dutch public discussions in recent years surrounding the Tata factory in IJmuiden, the nuisance to local residents and the negative consequences for their health hardly play a role here. Even though the window frames of the houses directly opposite the factory site are covered in a layer of brown-orange dust, just like the rims of the cars parked in the streets.

The pollution is the worst at night, says local resident Paul Sergent, because the blast furnaces run day and night. “When you get up in the morning, a new layer of dust has been added.” He is standing outside the supermarket with his dog waiting for his wife, but he lives around the corner, he points out, right under the smoke of the factory site. You feel it in your lungs, says Sergent. Although he already suffered from that, because he used to work in the mines.

Sergent would prefer if the factory were closed completely, he says honestly. “It cannot continue like this. My grandchildren live here, it is better for their future.” Although he does have sympathy for the employees. “For them, closure would be the worst. But we still have to take care of our earth somehow.”

Sergent is in the minority with his views in Port Talbot. Greenpeace organized in the Netherlands all kinds of actions to make Tata IJmuiden greener, and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the amounts of hazardous metals in settled dust. Here in Wales, environmental organizations do not campaign at all. “There is insufficient support for this among the local population,” says a spokesperson for Greenpeace United Kingdom.

In the meantime, the share of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons – PAHs for short, the substances that are also a problem in IJmuiden – in the air is actually increasing. In 2021, the concentration of PAHs was almost three times higher than in 2020, it says in a study from the council to the air quality in Port Talbot. And at 0.48 nanograms per cubic meter, the concentration is also higher than the national guideline, which is 0.25 nanograms per cubic meter. “The regulator is working with Tata to tackle this problem,” the municipality writes. The concentrations of particulate matter, cadmium, benzene and lead measured in the air around the factory site are higher than in the rest of the country, but are within national guidelines.

Into the street Port Talbot (Wales).

Steel is needed

“Pollution is the price we pay to live here,” says Gayle Parker. “Anyone who has problems with that might be better off moving.” Parker runs Dinner Jackets, a small coffee and deli in the residential area across from Tata Steel. There are three tables inside, one of which has customers sitting at it. The display case is full of sandwiches, potatoes and spreads. The facade of her corner building contains images of potatoes in tuxedos.

Without Tata it can also close down, says Parker, as many of its customers work at the factory or have Tata as the main client for their company. “And that applies to everyone here. My daughter has a hair salon. Her customers have also started talking about the layoffs, they will no longer be able to pay for their haircuts if those plans go ahead.”

Of course, Parker also thinks it is important that something is done about climate change, but not at any price. “As a country, we need a steel industry, right? We must be able to produce steel for our defense equipment. That will never be possible without emissions.” And Tata is already doing what it can to combat pollution, she says, it rains dust much less often than a few years ago. And the company offers citizens compensation for the inconvenience: they can claim 250 pounds (290 euros) to have their car cleaned and there are also compensations for damage to houses and windows.

But suppose that local residents here also have an average lifespan of 2.5 months shorter, just like the RIVM research institute that calculated for IJmuiden? Parker: “There are a lot of elderly people living here, so that won’t be too bad. We just need the factory to keep this region alive.” Employee salaries at the plant are 36 percent higher than the regional average. And in addition to the four thousand ‘own’ jobs, Tata also offers indirect employment: between eight and nine thousand self-employed entrepreneurs work on a contract basis. Tata then invests another £2 billion in the local economy, through taxes and supporting local sports clubs and schools, for example.

Port Talbot is making a loss

The trade unions involved, including Unite and Community, now recognize that making steel production more sustainable is necessary. In response to the deal between Tata and the British government, they will soon come up with their own plan for Port Talbot, which should amount to a “just transition”. They probably propose, among other things, that one of the two blast furnaces continue to operate for another ten years and that a new electricity-powered smelting furnace be added.

steel plant managerBarbara Evans We do not conduct any experiments with progressive technologies

Does Tata Steel really want to become greener? That’s not the whole story, says union representative Stephen Davies. He is from the Unite trade union and has worked at the steelworks for forty-five years. “I always call it one shithole, but the best shithole that happened to me in my life.” He started out as a welder. His parents worked there, his son works there now.

The problem, says Davies, is that Tata has been making a loss in Wales for years. With the exception of the year just after the corona crisis, when demand was high and energy prices were still relatively favorable. Davies: “When they first announced their plans we heard that they might want to bring steel coils and plates here from India or the Netherlands. Then their announcement has nothing to do with greener steel. This plan is simply because they can no longer sustain the leakage of money.”

In the third quarter of this year, Tata Steel suffered a loss of 135 million pounds (155 million euros) at the plant in Wales, which is almost 1.5 million pounds per day. So the owners in India had to do something. In the Financial Times Tata threatened already last year that without state support they might have to close the factory completely.

Mandatory British steel

High energy prices contribute to the losses, but according to the unions it is mainly the structural lack of investment and the lack of a long-term plan that is causing Port Talbot to perform poorly. They’ve been sticking plasters on for years, Davies says. He gives the loading and unloading equipment in the port as an example. They had three of those, but one has been broken for months. “It is still hanging at the end of the pier because properly dismantling and removing the device is too expensive.”

Of course, the 1.25 billion pounds that Tata and the British government want to invest together is not nearly enough, Davies also says. Trade union Unite arrives at the required amount of 1 billion pounds per year, for twelve years, to increase production and at the same time make it more sustainable. And Unite wants to change national procurement rules so that British steel must be used for public projects. But 12 billion is a very high target: opposition party Labor would be prepared to invest 3 billion pounds in the entire British steel sector.

The employees in Port Talbot feel abandoned, says manager Barbara Evans, especially compared to other countries where Tata is located. “We do not conduct experiments with progressive technologies, and we receive no money for research. In the Netherlands, Spain, Germany, something happens everywhere, but not here.” In IJmuiden for example, there is a plan for an installation that must operate on hydrogen.

Her department was promised a new power plant back in 2014, Evans says, but it never materialized. “We already had drawings of where the control room would be located, they had spent money on new cabling. Yet suddenly it didn’t happen. I never got an explanation for it.” They work with techniques and machines from the 1950s, she says. “We have two industrial dynamo sets. There is one just like it in the museum down the road in Swansea.”