Chamber and committees

I refer the member to the answer to question S5W-24293 on 1 August 2019. All answers to written parliamentary questions are available on the Parliament's website, the search facility for which can be found at http://www.parliament.scot/parliamentarybusiness/28877.aspx

The First Minister’s Advisory Group on Human Rights Leadership reported in December 2018. It recommended a new statutory human rights framework for Scotland, including a right to a healthy environment.

The new National Taskforce will now take forward the Group’s principal recommendations, and will be co-chaired by myself and Professor Alan Miller. Its formal remit and membership will be announced in due course.

The choice of a return to retail model which maximises accessibility is intended to minimise any risk of variation by geography or demography. The scheme has been carefully designed to ensure that those purchasing their containers can return them easily, no matter their circumstances.

The modelling was done at a national level and is based on information on performance of other international schemes. The choice of a return to retail model which maximises accessibility is intended to minimise any risk of variation by geography or demography.

The approach of advertising the deposit price separately has been identified as best practice from extensive evidence gathering in countries with well-established deposit return schemes as well as experience from other policies such as the single use carrier bags charge.

We are working with local authorities to understand fully and to mitigate potential impacts on kerbside collection services. The choice of a 20p deposit level is intended to provide a strong incentive to return containers through the DRS system. It is likely that a percentage of containers will also be recycled through kerbside collections and will be captured as part of wider statistics on recycling of household waste.

As noted in the previous response, the financial liability for the scheme will fall on drinks producers. This will be reflected in the regulatory approach.

This is an on-going process with local authorities and part of much wider on-going engagement over waste, therefore there is no anticipated end date.

This information is not held centrally.

Landfill operators report total tonnage of wastes deposited broken down by European Waste Catalogue code to the Scottish Environment Protection Agency but they do not report the origin of each load of waste.

Construction is a priority in our circular economy strategy “Making Things Last” ( https://www.gov.scot/publications/making-things-last-circular-economy-strategy-scotland/ ) and in line with the waste hierarchy, we encourage the reuse and recycling of materials where possible in all construction projects. In addition, the statutory guidance accompanying the Procurement Reform (Scotland) Act 2014 sets out how to comply with the sustainable procurement duty that applies to public procurements: https://www.gov.scot/publications/sustainable-procurement-duty-tools/

There has been a steady increase in the quantity of waste soils put back to productive use in Scotland. In 2017, Scotland recycled 71% of waste soil from construction projects.