Chamber and committees

Local authorities will receive the full net costs of managing packaging through EPR, taking account of efficient and effective service provision. That might mean that, over time, the money that councils decide to spend on the waste management envelope will get taken over by the funding coming from EPR. As a result, it will come down to councils’ decisions about how they manage their funding.

I am not going to look into the future and say what the finance secretary of a future Government might do about council settlements—indeed, I do not think that you would expect me to do so—but the idea is that there will be additional money coming from EPR and then, as a result of councils’ spending decisions, they might be in a position to release money that they would otherwise have spent on waste management to spend on other areas. What that will mean for future council settlements is not something that I am able to answer here and now, because obviously that will be up to a future finance cabinet secretary to decide.

However, that is the mechanism that will be put in place. Essentially, EPR is all about producers having responsibility for waste management—in this instance, of packaging, although other regulations that I hope we will be able to agree to might come forward from the UK Government, extending EPR to other types of waste.

We need to be alive to any kind of modifications that there could be to things that are on the market. As I have said, the four nations have worked together to put together a definition that, we think, will avoid that kind of situation. However, there are, of course, some very clever people out there who might see a gap in the market, so we need to be alive to that as the regulations are implemented.

In its consultation, the UK Government included a proposal to introduce a duty on all vapes. I am trying to think whether that was a pre-general election commitment or a post-general election commitment. We are awaiting the publication of the report and, obviously, we are working with counterparts across the UK on what the next steps might be. Therefore, the introduction of a duty on all vapes is not off the table.

We are concentrating on bringing in the regulations on single-use vapes, but we are doing so with an eye to what might happen, which will inform what the UK Government does with regard to the imposition of a duty on rechargeable and reusable vapes. If what you and the convener are suggesting might happen does happen and there is innovation such that, in effect, reusable vapes end up costing the same as disposable ones, with the result that people, rather than recharging them and reusing them, do not value or look after them, that will inform the conversations that we have on the potential imposition of a duty on reusable vape mechanisms in the future.

As I mentioned, there is now the ability to issue fixed-penalty notices, which has been done in concert with SCOTSS in relation to the powers that trading standards officers need. Giving them that extra power was one of the reasons why we brought this in when we did, through the Circular Economy (Scotland) Act 2024. Perhaps my officials have more detail on the on-going discussion with SCOTSS.

No. If we were to put in place a requirement for local authorities to collect and recycle these types of disposable vapes, that would be the cost of it. They are extremely expensive to recycle because, as I say, they are not designed to be taken apart easily. In effect, you would have a person breaking them open and separating them into their component parts. By taking them out of the waste equation altogether, we are getting rid of that difficulty. Even if we were to recycle them, and even if we were to go down the route of saying that they have to be recycled in a certain way, the cost would be huge. As I mentioned, only 1 per cent of the ones that are brought back or put into recycling are recycled properly anyway, given the difficulty of recycling them. Most of them go into general waste or are thrown down in streets, into hedgerows or out of cars.

I am not entirely familiar with reusable devices that would work only a couple of times. It seems to me that, if you were going to invest in something of a certain price that was designed to be reusable, you would want it to last, so I think that consumer choice will come into play.

Do my officials have anything to add? I am not entirely sure how we can predict how consumers will react.

I will keep it brief, convener. Thank you for the invitation to give you evidence this morning.

We want to ban the sale and supply of single-use vapes in order to make our communities greener and healthier. Research commissioned by the Scottish Government found that up to 26 million disposable vapes are consumed in Scotland in just one year, and that that consumption involves between 800 tonnes and 1,000 tonnes of packaging. It also found that, of those vapes, an estimated 10 per cent were littered and more than half were incorrectly disposed of.

It is not just a problem in Scotland: across the UK, 73 per cent of vapers say that they throw away single-use vapes, which leads us far from the circular economy that we are all trying to build. The lost lithium is equivalent to throwing away the lithium in 5,000 electric vehicle batteries every year. Some 5 million single-use vapes are thrown away every week in the UK, and it is estimated that, of the single-use vapes that are returned to shops or sent to recycling centres, only 1 per cent are recycled, due to the complexity of doing so. Batteries from electrical items, including vapes, have been responsible also for approximately 700 fires in bin lorries and at recycling centres in the UK, and that impact has been felt keenly in Scotland.

This year, 54 per cent of vape users under 18 said that a single-use vape was the vaping device that they use most frequently, so action clearly needs to be taken. In last year’s programme for government, we therefore committed to take action to tackle the environmental impact of single-use vapes. We have consulted on the policy proposal, the draft regulations and impact assessments, and we have worked very closely with the respective Governments across the UK to align our policies, and we have laid the draft regulations before you today, in keeping with our commitments.

If the draft instrument before you is passed by the Parliament, it will ban the sale and supply of single-use vapes in the course of business in Scotland from 1 April 2025. That date was agreed with the other UK nations, which are also implementing a ban. We are the first to lay regulations for the policy, and each nation will bring its own legislation in due course. The ban will reduce waste and the number of single-use vapes littered, and it will tackle our throwaway culture by encouraging more sustainable behaviour.

We have worked very closely with trading standards officers to ensure that they have the necessary powers to enforce the regulations, which reflects their feedback through our various consultations. We will continue to work closely with them as we move towards implementation.

From litter on our streets to the risk of fires at waste facilities, single-use vapes are increasingly an issue for our environment, local communities and young people. The draft instrument is a crucial step in tackling their environmental impact, and I urge you to support it. I am happy to take any questions.

As with any regulations, anyone who is trading in the UK is subject to the laws.

Initially, there were obviously a lot of questions around what it might mean for them and a discussion about what influence they would have in the design of the EPR. The administrator put together a steering group, because it was important that businesses had an influence on how the EPR would be designed—obviously, this is a UK instrument that is coming to us to agree on. It allowed members of that steering group to perform an advisory role.

Indicative producer base fees were released in August and gave businesses indicative accounts of what they can expect to pay per tonne under the EPR. Those have been dealt with at the four-nations level, because the business community has been involved in the design of the EPR from the get-go.

It might be important to say that I am genuinely looking forward to seeing how businesses and producers of goods and packaging adapt to that. I think that what we will see as a result is an improvement in our packaging, as they will not want to pay a lot of money for the soft packet plastics and so on. I am excited to see how that will develop. I think that we will see a revolution and innovation in the way that packaging for our goods is manufactured and designed, because businesses and producers will want to take the waste plastics away as much as possible. I hope that the fact that this is getting moved across all four nations means that they will see a market for better packaging—not only are there market opportunities for those producers, but they are also looking at how to bring down waste at source.

I will make it as short as possible, convener.

The committee will recall that, during the passage of the Circular Economy (Scotland) Bill, amendments were lodged by the Government to ensure that various pieces of legislation that would apply to Scotland’s other public bodies would also apply to Zero Waste Scotland. The transition follows a decision that was made by the Office for National Statistics for Zero Waste Scotland to be classified as a public sector organisation, as it is primarily directed and funded by Scottish ministers. Work is well under way to ensure an orderly transition, and—subject to how the committee votes today—we fully expect the change of status to take effect from 1 October. Zero Waste Scotland will be subject to the same provisions on public finance and accountability as other public bodies in Scotland, and it is important that the organisation has a designated accountable officer as part of routine good governance.

Zero Waste Scotland will not be part of the Scottish Administration under the Scotland Act 1998. That means that, for the purposes of the Public Finance and Accountability (Scotland) Act 2000, the permanent secretary, as principal accounting officer, cannot appoint an accountable officer for Zero Waste Scotland. However, article 2 of the draft order requires that Zero Waste Scotland be audited by the Auditor General for Scotland, which consequently engages the relevant provision of part 2 of the 2000 act.

Where a body’s accounts are subject to audit by the Auditor General, the permanent secretary will then be given power to designate an accountable officer for Zero Waste Scotland under section 15(3) of the 2000 act.

I hope that that gives a summary of what we are doing; I will close there.