Meeting of the Parliament 03 September 2015
First and foremost, I thank Margaret Mitchell for ensuring that this important issue has been brought to the Parliament for debate. I also thank the members who signed my amendment to her motion. I know that Margaret Mitchell has put a lot of effort into resolving the issue in Falkirk district, as have I.
As we know, the spreading of sewage sludge on farmland has come about as a result of a European Union directive banning the dumping of sewage at sea. It is an issue that has attracted a great deal of debate and a number of complaints in my constituency, not least in the Upper Braes area, which includes Slamannan and the surrounding villages.
I set up a problem-solving partnership meeting and held a number of meetings with SEPA and Scottish Water to try to ensure that my constituents were not inconvenienced in the way that they had been for a number of years. As Margaret Mitchell mentioned, more than 1,300 members of the community have previously submitted letters of objection to Falkirk Council regarding the process. As we know, Avonbridge and Standburn community council lodged a petition earlier this year with the Public Petitions Committee regarding sewage sludge spreading.
As a result of that pressure, Scottish Water has improved procedures for sewage disposal and is now transporting only dried sewage pellets to Falkirk district, which are treated before arriving for disposal in the Falkirk area. That is welcome progress indeed. However, as Margaret Mitchell said, sewage sludge is being received from firms other than Scottish Water, which is still an issue. The change in procedures at Scottish Water has significantly cut down on the smells emanating from the fields after spreading or from the heaps of sewage sludge that were stockpiled at various locations around Slamannan, but farmers are clearly still entitled to use that resource as a fertiliser.
However, there is another issue that the minister should be made aware of. Much of the waste that is currently causing inconvenience and annoyance to my constituents in Upper Braes seems to be food waste, not sewage sludge or pellets. It is being transported to a couple of local lagoons, and the gas created by anaerobic respiration during the decompression of that organic material causes an unpleasant smell that can be confused with the smell emanating from the sewage sludge.
The smell from the trucks transporting that waste can also be overpowering, and I have had reports of children vomiting in the street, not just at the local primary school, after those lorries pass through the local villages. However, SEPA has stated that that smell is not a public health issue and that soil samples of the farmland where the material is spread indicated no public health issues at all. That is a major concern of mine, following information that I received from SEPA.
I have serious concerns regarding those lagoons, which are used to store digestate from anaerobic digestion, and I believe that there is a serious loophole that results in them not being properly regulated. They do not require any type of planning permission, so they are not regulated, and they do not fall under either local authorities’ or SEPA’s remit for checking, even though the product in the lagoon is being used in the production of sludge for spreading. I have also been informed by SEPA that it is unable to test the contents as it needs to know what it is testing for in the first place.
Although waste management operators are required to keep records, and although SEPA is entitled to inspect them, if we have unscrupulous operators who do not keep accurate records, there is no knowing what is being spread on the land. That worrying aspect needs to be looked at in more detail, and I have alerted SEPA to my concerns and expect to have a meeting with senior officials soon. I am also aware that SEPA is actively pursuing a meeting with Falkirk Council to agree each other’s remits and responsibilities. In the meantime, however, the lagoons go unchecked.
Although I welcome the fact that in recent months Scottish Water has been diverting sewage sludge away from Falkirk district, I think that there needs to be a long-term strategy. We need look no further than Sweden, where only 14 per cent of sewage is spread on land, and the Netherlands, where I believe the vast majority of sewage is incinerated. In Sweden, incineration—[Interruption.] I am sorry, Presiding Officer; I have only just noticed the time. I will try to speed up.
In Sweden, incineration fits in with the larger Swedish goal of recovering the important minerals from the sludge for reuse, and currently 49.83 per cent of sludge in that country is disposed of through incineration. When sludge is incinerated through mono-combustion, the ash can be processed to extract phosphorus and other useful materials.
I will cut out the technicalities of the benefits of incineration and simply welcome the Scottish Government’s sludge review, which I hope will have the end result of more appropriate ways of disposing of sewage—preferably through incineration—and look forward to tighter regulation of the lagoons used to produce sludge that will ultimately be spread on farmland. I also look forward to the minister’s response.
12:46