Hansard

I join my fellow members in congratulating Gillian Mackay on securing the debate and in thanking her for her on-going campaigning on the issue.

In the contributions to the debate we have heard about the energy that has been generated and the focus of communities and councils across Scotland on this serious matter. I am comforted that we all understand the issues well and that we all agree on the seriousness of the concerns that are being raised.

I also thank the members of the Scottish Youth Parliament who have spoken to me about single-use vapes on more than one occasion, and who really wanted to emphasise their concerns for their peers’ health and for the environment. It is a matter that concerns young people very much.

Carol Mochan, Alexander Stewart, Colin Smyth and others flagged up their concerns about young people’s health. Single-use vapes have, perhaps, become more of a pathway into smoking than a pathway out of smoking. With 5 million single-use vapes being discarded every week in the UK, it is hard to imagine that they are primarily being used by people who are trying to quit. I imagine that parents must be terrified that their children are becoming the next generation that will be addicted to nicotine.

Carol Mochan made a good point on data collection. Members should, please, be assured that I am working closely with the Minister for Public Health and Women’s Health on the matter, so it is absolutely a cross-portfolio matter.

On the environmental side, Rona Mackay made good points about litter, and Emma Harper highlighted the waste of valuable lithium, which we know is so important for the transition to net zero, but is also potentially so dangerous if it is discarded irresponsibly. Last week, I met managers of waste facilities who made an emotional plea about the safety of their workers. Batteries have been implicated in 700 fires in bin lorries and recycling centres in the UK, which poses a serious danger to workers in the industry. The plea from those managers was that we take urgent action to protect workers’ safety.

Mercedes Villalba made excellent points about the litter on our streets. I see in my streets the same thing as Mercedes has observed in Dundee. Retailers are obliged to provide facilities for people who buy the vapes to return them to those retailers, or they must pay into a fund to provide recycling facilities for them. It is clear that retailers are not doing that—that work is not being undertaken—so, in addition to considering a consultation on a ban, we must look urgently at enforcement of the rules. Retailers need to be responsible and to ensure that vaping products are not ending up in the hands of children, and they need to ensure that they are meeting their obligations to provide adequate recycling.

Many members have highlighted the difficulty of recycling the materials when there is a battery embedded in a single-use plastic product. Single-use electronics are even worse than single-use plastics. We are too far along in the climate emergency to have new single-use plastic products. We have been working very hard to remove single-use plastics; many industries are working to do that, so this industry’s having created a whole new single-use plastic product, the numbers of which have tripled over the past couple of years, with serious environmental and human health issues, is a great concern to us.

I thank Stephanie Callaghan, Brian Whittle and Kenneth Gibson for highlighting the nature of some of the companies that are involved in the marketing, and the danger that the products pose to our children by those companies putting profits ahead of human and environmental health.

I want to reassure members that we are taking serious action on the matter. On Colin Smyth’s comments about the Circular Economy (Scotland) Bill, the bill is not actually required for us to take action on the matter; we already have the powers. We are looking at a range of options, but under our existing powers we can ban problematic single-use products if there is sufficient evidence of environmental harm. The enormous growth of single-use vaping products in recent years absolutely provides that evidence, so we can use those powers.

As Emma Harper pointed out, implementation of the powers could come into conflict with the United Kingdom Internal Market Act 2020. However, yesterday I had a constructive meeting with my counterparts in the Welsh and UK Governments. We have agreed to work together on our approach, up to and including a ban. All the nations of the UK have in common the agreement to work together; of course, a common approach will be the most effective.

If a ban is where we are heading, it will take some time to work towards that, so we need in the meantime—as members have highlighted—to take other actions on enforcement, product design and marketing. I will be working with my counterparts in the other nations of the UK on that matter.