Current status: Answered by Gillian Martin on 7 June 2024
To ask the Scottish Government what assessment it has made of the scale of e-waste in Scotland, and what steps it is taking to tackle e-waste.
Between 28 December 2023 and 7 March 2024, the Scottish Government, along with the UK, Welsh and Northern Irish governments, held a consultation on reforming the producer responsibility system for waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE). This consultation sought views on a number of policy reforms, including the introduction of a producer financed household collection system for small and large items of WEEE, enhancing retailer obligations to provide a free collection on delivery service for large appliances, extending obligations to online marketplaces, creating a category for vapes to ensure that treatment and collection costs are borne by vapes producers, and establishing a new WEEE scheme administrator.
While we do not have Scotland-specific data on the scale of e-waste, it was calculated as part of our impact assessments that an estimated 155kt of WEEE is disposed of in household residual waste collections in the UK annually, which is then sent to landfill and energy from waste. This is equivalent to 5.3kg per household per year.