SESA evidence to Scottish Parliament on climate change

In a lively session of the Environment Committee of the Scottish Parliament, Dirk Hazell gave evidence on behalf of SESA on the waste provisions of the Climate Change (Scotland) Bill.

SESA was joined by the Federation of Small Businesses in Scotland, the Community Recycling Network and Glasgow Caledonian University.

As currently drafted, this Bill would give Scottish Ministers very wide-ranging new powers – for example to apply waste prevention plans.

Many of the Committee’s questions focussed on evidence submitted by SESA emphasising that a new law should at least make it clear who would be committing new criminal offences with unlimited fines. For example, if there were to be new duties to provide information on waste generated, and SESA in principle supported good quality data, the Bill should specify that this duty would fall on the producer and not on the waste manager.

The Federation of Small Businesses supported SESA on the general point, confirming that the Bill “takes massive enabling powers which is extremely unhelpful if we are trying to work out the potential impact of the legislation”.

Another major point made by SESA was the need for law in Scotland to reflect obligations under EU law, particularly in a context where complying with European law was such a challenge for Scotland. Mr Hazell in particular criticised the use of the word “recycling” in the Bill when it meant “recovery”. This was an unhelpful fudge, for example, in the context of Article 11 of the new Waste Framework Directive which would result in Scotland needing to meet specific recycling objectives, and the Scottish law in any case needed to reflect the five tier waste hierarchy in the new Directive.

The witnesses were asked about deposit and return schemes.

SESA made the point that, while these worked well in a number of European countries, Scotland needed continuity of policy between administrations given the long life span needed to make viable collection and treatment infrastructure.
Scotland had achieved even more rapid increases than England in recycling based on doorstep recycling. Superimposing deposit and return would result in taxpayers not getting full value for money from collection infrastructure provided to boost doorstep recycling.

Mr Hazell also noted that the Scottish Government had provided no cost benefit or life cycle analysis to support deposit and return schemes.

The Community Recycling Network accepted SESA’s reservation about deposit and return but asserted that co-mingled collections resulted in contaminated, low value materials. Mr Hazell said this was not the case and that, while more standardisation of household collection might be helpful, different methods of collection would suit different places. Inner city tenements were not, for example, an obvious candidate for separated collections.

Mr Hazell also noted, with particular reference to The Mail on Sunday, that some recent media coverage of recycling had been tendentious and misleading: despite exceptional volatility in commodity markets, SESA’s Members were in fact overwhelmingly getting materials recycled.

Responding to a question from Elaine Murray MSP, Mr Hazell noted the need for transparent and robust metrics and reported that, in a context where the regulators’ metrics were not felt to be sufficiently precise, ESA was working towards producing metrics during 2009 that would specify the carbon footprint of individual waste management facilities and, through benchmarking, accelerate the sector’s improvement.

In support of Scottish regulators, Mr Hazell spoke of the need to ensure that, as the Landfill Tax rose, SEPA was better resourced to catch criminals and more specialist procurators fiscal were retained to bring cases to court. A rising Landfill Tax would remove the need for too interventionist and prescriptive an approach towards business waste but it was imperative that criminals were not allowed to bypass either fiscal or regulatory drivers.

In particular, it was important, where regulatory regimes such as those of England and Scotland shared a land border, that regulatory arbitrage did not create artificial or facilitate criminal flows of waste.

At the time of going to press, SEPA and the Scottish cabinet secretary were due to give evidence to the Committee’s final session on the waste provisions of the Bill.