By Laura Tainsh, partner and waste management specialist at law firm Davidson Chambers Stewart
LAST month the Scottish Environment Secretary Roseanna Cunningham was forced to delay one of her government’s flagship climate change commitments to impose a ban on biodegradable municipal waste (BMW) going to landfill from January 2021. She’s now postponed the ban until 2025 after reaching the conclusion that councils and commercial operators were not simply ready for it.
Given the position illustrated by the Scottish Government-commissioned Waste Markets Study and the advice of an industry working group advising on the policy, a delay and potential transition to the ban was clearly necessary to avoid it having a detrimental impact on the economy. The waste sector, which would have been particularly affected, especially welcomed the four-year delay.
While there is relief about the extension, the minister’s announcement would have ideally come sooner. The advice from industry since the beginning of 2018 was that a decision on any proposed delay to the landfill ban should have been made public by early June at the latest, prior to the Scottish Parliament’s summer recess. The failure to do this forced a number of local authorities and landfill operators to make less than informed investment decisions on the basis they may have needed to have necessary procedures in place by 2021.
Clackmannanshire Council, for example, took the costly route of contracting to have its biodegradable landfill waste shipped to Sweden to be incinerated. At the time of signing the agreement, the central Scotland local authority cited it as a short-term solution to the impending ban they believed to be coming into effect in 2021.
Meanwhile, some landfill operators have also made decisions not to invest in additional void space on their sites with the ban expected in 2021. Scotland may now find that despite the delay, there is less landfill opportunity than is required in the interim as a result.
It’s important to focus on the environmental benefits of the landfill ban, including from a climate change perspective, which are clear. We must now focus on 2025 as the actual backstop for it being brought into place. That requires close collaboration between the Scottish Government, local authorities and the private sector between now and then to ensure all relevant groups are prepared for the ban coming into effect then.
The key challenge will be getting the right infrastructure into the right places by 2025. This includes investment in energy infrastructure for waste and anaerobic digestion to limit the need to export landfill to other countries. The resource management company Suez Group estimates that, at a UK-wide level, getting the right infrastructure in place would cost billions of pounds suggesting costs could run into the hundreds of millions in Scotland alone.
The ‘centrally coordinated intervention’ which Ms Cunninghame has called for will also need to be suitably resourced. This should include Scottish Government support in bringing together all those local authorities which do not have a viable option to comply with the ban to help them procure a solution.
While preparing for the ban’s new 2025 implementation date, additional focus must go towards allowing for waste minimisation measures, including the deposit return scheme and food waste action plan, to help in reducing the volume of potential landfill waste in Scotland.
Given the economic and environmental cost of transporting waste as well as the ever-increasing challenges to exporting it (which are unlikely to be improved by Brexit), the more waste treatment and disposal that Scotland can deal with domestically, the better it will be for all of us.
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