Chamber and committees

Yes.

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.

I think that taxing the devices was considered as an option. Zero Waste Scotland’s scoping report looked at the options for managing the environmental impact of single-use vapes, but it concluded that, although taxation might support the policy objectives, it would have a limited effect if it was not tied to waste management outcomes. When it comes to the possible implementation of a duty on vapes, consideration would need to be given to the people who access them for smoking cessation and the equality impact that such a measure would have.

It could be argued that the higher the price of something, the less likely people are to buy it. However, we must recognise that, although vaping has health implications, because it involves people taking nicotine into their bloodstream—obviously, I am not a health minister, so I will not go into too much detail on this—if we make vapes too expensive, that could affect a lot of people who are trying to quit smoking, who see vapes as an alternative. Vapes are not prescribed as a smoking cessation tool. They have been brought in by manufacturers as an aid. Most smoking cessation tends to involve the use of patches, gums and so on.

In the round, the four nations thought that introducing regulations on single-use vapes would be the best first step, and that it would represent quite a large step in getting rid of the litter problem. However, that does not stop us looking at what might happen after 1 April and how consumer behaviour might change. The convener made that point, and you are making a similar point. How might behaviour shift? What might the design of reusable vapes look like? What littering implications might a shift to reusable vapes have? Although the regulations relate to single-use vapes, in the future we will have to monitor how they work and to look at some of the consequences of the kind that you have described with regard to what happens to reusable vapes.

Of course, we are looking at how we dispose of electrical items in general as part of all the waste management strategies that are in train under the Circular Economy (Scotland) Act 2024. As vapes are one example of such items, they will be taken into account as part of that. However, I think that the regulations, in taking disposable vapes off our streets, out of our bins and out of circulation, will have an enormous impact and will be a major first step.