Where do your tools come from?

With the current crisis in the British steel industry it’s an interesting time to consider how many everyday items are actually made from steel in the UK. For a landscaper, many essential tools are made from steel, as are the cars and vans used to transport materials.

We’re all susceptible to a good deal and often this boils down to price and quality. Any landscaper worth their salt, will usually choose quality. But when the materials are cheap in a massive market, you can also get both.  A double whammy of decent tools and a great price.

But do you know where your steel tools come from? A large proportion of steel is actually from China. And the Chinese steel industry has seen exports rise from 400% in the last six years to areas across the globe, including Europe.

Tata, an Indian steel giant, announced plans to sell off the British steel plants it currently owns as they had reached a £1million a day losses. Tata pulled out of talks with the UK government to save the plants after the government refused to back calls in Europe for higher tariffs against Chinese steel imports.

And this is where those great deals on prices come from. China has been accused of cut-price dumping. This is the ‘practise of selling goods in a foreign markets at an unfairly low price – typically, one lower than the going rate in the exporters home market’.

The aforementioned tariffs are supposed to be a measure against this happening: ‘anti-dumping measures are intended to prevent a company from selling goods below the cost in order to drive competitors out of business, before using the resulting market power to gouge customers’.

If one company drives all of its competition into administration then they become the sole supplier of a product. So basically, if China is the only one producing steel then they can actually charge whatever they want for it. Which means those great deals might just stop being so great.

And this doesn’t even consider the human effect to communities built around steel production. Overall there’s about 40,000 jobs at risk through the crisis in British steel, and in certain concentrated areas this could cause towns to completely crumble.

Do you know where the tools you use are manufactured? Maybe the next time you pick up a knife or grab a shovel it might be worth thinking about where in the world that steel comes from.