Meeting of the Parliament 26 June 2024
As I understand it, it was a negotiation in Wales.
In its analysis of the bill, the Finance and Public Administration Committee raised concerns about the pressures on local authorities and said that more work will need to be done to address cost savings and changes to revenues that the bill would lead to. The code of practice is a key issue and it is key that partnership work and funding take place.
The waste hierarchy is important, because we tend to focus on how we deal with waste instead of supporting our communities and businesses to repurpose, reuse, repair and recycle goods and products and materials, rather than seeing them going to waste and damaging our environment and communities. Where the circular economy is critical is in how we design products in the first place, so that they do not become obsolete, with valuable materials that could be reused being dumped.
One of the missed opportunities that I hope the minister will come back to was in Maurice Golden’s stage 3 amendment to require public bodies to prepare a circular economy plan. That is critical, because public procurement is key. It would incentivise investment in circular economy products, practices and supply chains, raise awareness among public bodies and make a real difference. I hope that the minister will come back to that.
We need stronger action on how we deal with plastics that damage our environment, whether on land or sea, and it is about coming together to think about what more can be done there. Recently, I was contacted by a constituent who, as a schoolteacher, was taking school students to take part in a beach clean, and they were shocked to see the levels of pollution there, and a lot of it was plastic. One of the things that will be key to the implementation of the bill will be investing in schools and involving them in the discussion, so that we educate young people about the damage that is caused by waste and what they can do to stop it. From talking to parents, I know that kids sometimes feed back information from schools.
We need to make everybody aware of the impact of avoiding the generation of waste and dealing with the waste that we produce much more responsibly, we need to make demands on companies and local authorities in that regard, and we need support to be provided for the fantastic community projects that enable our constituents to reuse and repair products. There is a lot more that we could do in that area.
I have mentioned missed opportunities, and I want to finish by giving a couple of examples. One of those involved my global responsibility ambition in relation to not offshoring our waste and leaving other countries to deal with it. Between 2004 and 2022, Scottish waste exports rose from 0.4 megatonnes to 1.5 megatonnes, which is a massive increase.
Whether on our climate ambitions or our efforts to be a global leader, we need to do more. We need to take more seriously the issue of where our materials come from and the human rights and environmental impacts of that, and we need to make sure that work to address that is built into our everyday work and that the public sector leads on that. We will have to come back to the bill, because the job is not finished.
17:35