About 80% of Scotland’s carbon footprint is caused by the goods and services we consume, including extraction, transport and manufacturing processes. In the current ‘linear’ system, most products are made, used and then disposed of as ‘waste’. Keeping these materials and products in circulation would be much better for businesses, people, and the environment.
Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is one tool that could help achieve this transition. The idea of EPR is that producers bear the responsibility for reducing the environmental impacts of products they make. Currently, EPR schemes mainly focus on how to dispose of products responsibly at the end of their lives; producers may do this themselves or pay another organisation to do it, such as a local authority or private waste management company. But EPR could have a much bigger impact by considering the whole lifecycle of a product: designing products to maximise their useful life through reuse, repair and durability, as well as ensuring that products can be recycled back into high quality products when they reach the end of their lives.
The Scottish Government is working with the other UK administrations to develop EPR policies and regulations. Zero Waste Scotland commissioned research to explore issues around EPR for packaging, waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE), and batteries in five remote and rural council areas: Orkney, Shetland, Western Isles, Argyll & Bute and Highland. The report finds that all these council areas have little scope for sorting and processing ‘waste’, with high costs due to long transport distances, as well as weather and ferry disruption. Most of the material is sent to treatment and processing facilities in Scotland’s Central Belt. The Highland Council sends most of its recyclable waste outside Scotland. It is a one-way flow of materials and embedded energy out of these areas.
Here in Skye and Lochalsh we are lucky to have access to the re-use initiatives such as Waste Not at Torrin, the Lochalsh Re-use and Recycle Hub, and the ILM social enterprise which collects used domestic electrical equipment from Portree and Kyleakin for refurbishment/resale, or recycling if the items have reached their end of their useful life. But more support is needed for local initiatives, such as repair services, use and return schemes, refillables, helping community initiatives to link up circular economy schemes and create economies of scale, reining in throw-away habits and avoiding creating waste in the first place e.g. local bans on disposable cups.
What happens to ‘waste’ packaging, electricals and batteries collected in the Highland Council area. DMR= Dry mixed recycling, HWRC= Household waste recycling centre. Source: EPR report.