Question reference: S6W-01877
- Asked by: Maurice Golden, MSP for North East Scotland, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
- Date lodged: 26 July 2021
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Current status: Answered by Michael Matheson on 20 August 2021
Question
To ask the Scottish Government, further to the answer to question S6W-00674 by Michael Matheson on 23 July 2021, whether it will provide a breakdown of the measures that it has implemented since 2014 to increase the amount of plastic waste recycled within Scotland, and what effect these measures have had on the tonnage recycled.
Answer
Since 2014, there has been a 45% increase in household plastic waste recycling. Plastic recycling rose to 57,379 tonnes in 2019, which is the most recent data available, continuing the trend of increasing each year for the last eight years. While we don’t have a detailed breakdown of the impact, the measures outlined below will have made a positive contribution.
The Waste (Scotland) Regulations 2012 set requirements for the separate collection of key materials and prohibit separately collected material going to incineration or landfill.
In 2015, Scottish Government launched the Scottish Household Recycling Charter, supported by a Code of practice. This aims to bring more consistency to household recycling services, which deliver local and national benefits and encourage high levels of citizen participation in waste prevention, recycling and reuse.
The Scottish Material Brokerage Service was introduced in 2015 to deliver collaborative contracts for waste and recyclable materials from local authorities and other public bodies of sufficient scale to help local authorities and public bodies achieve a better deal, and reduce risk from price volatility. It supports the business conditions for investment in domestic reprocessing in Scotland by providing certainty in the volume and duration of supply of valuable materials.
Additionally, the statutory Code of Practice for Materials Recovery Facilities introduced a sampling procedure to improve transparency on material quality in the supply chain and to improve the quality of materials arriving for sorting.