Making Things Last – A Circular Economy Strategy for Scotland
Source: Making Things Last – A Circular Economy Strategy for Scotland – 00494471.pdf
Yesterday the Scottish Government launched their view of the future towards a Circular Economy in Scotland with food waste at the top of the Agenda – setting a 2015 target to reduce food waste by 1/3.
Of interest to our clients will be there focus to reform Producer Responsibility into a single framework for all areas. See below for details:-
7.1
Our ambition
We believe that producer responsibility offers an opportunity to drive innovation and greater circularity for certain products – to influence product design as well asincreasing reuse and recycling.
7.2
Context
At its simplest, Producer Responsibility is about ensuring that those who produce products and put them onto the market are responsible for the end of life management of their products especially for take back, recycling and final disposal
.
There are UK wide Producer Responsibility regimes for four materials
(End of Life Vehicles, Batteries, Packaging, and Waste Electronic and Electrical Equipment). Producer responsibility is devolved to the Scottish Parliament but generally delivered by the UK Government with the agreement of the Scottish Government and the administrations of the other devolved nations.
The current regimes are overly complex and are generally opaque to consumers.
Consumers have a substantial influence on how much value can be retained from a product, and so there is an opportunity to more accurately reflect the costs of disposing of an item in the price.
Eachregimefor each product type also operates independently,
resulting in duplication for business. The 2015 EU Circular Economy package highlights the much greater role that producer responsibility could play in driving a shift to a more circular economy.
7.3
Priorities
We believe there is potential to reform producer responsibility to keep these products in higher value use, and incentivise the use of products with increased durability, with recycled content or avoiding toxic materials which limit recycling. This could include influencing the demand for secondary materials such as recycled content or material quality.
We intend to explore the concept of asingle framework for producer responsibility, bringing together common elements into one flexible
and transparent system, making it simpler for businesses who are involved in more than one product type and making it easier to add new productsand materials to the producer responsibility regime in the future .
We intend to explore how we can improve the producer responsibility system to promote products that support a more circular economy, for example through increased durability and or with recycled content. We also intend exploring how we could direct more products into higher value use beyond recycling and into reuse and remanufacture.
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We want to explore how we can make the costs of recycling and disposing of products more transparent to consumers to help influence their purchase choices. We intend making tyres, furniture and mattresses
subject to producer responsibility, over and above the existing products.
We intend to convene an international group of experts on producer responsibility to develop and model such a framework for debate and discussion.
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