Before devolution, Scottish Office ministers relied on professional advice from their staff at the Hazard Waste Inspectorate, and a few members of the Scottish Centre Council of the Chartered Institute of Wastes Management (CIWM): experienced senior waste managers employed by Scottish councils who provided advice without fear or favour.

CIWM was also instrumental in setting up the Caledonian Shanks Centre for Waste Management at Glasgow Caledonian University, accessing funds generated by landfill tax receipts. It was later re-named the Caledonian Environment Centre (CEC).

When it became obvious that Scotland had no chance of meeting the waste diversion targets in the EEC’s Landfill Directive, the Scottish Parliament offered additional ring-fenced funding to allow the 32 councils expand their existing waste recycling schemes.

Coincidentally, CEC had developed a financial model that predicted how much waste any council could recycle, including transport, treatment and disposal costs.

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Parliament then allocated funding to individual councils using this information, also providing additional funding to enhance CEC’s work. This resulted in Scotland’s waste recycling performances soaring from under 5% in 2000, to over 45% by 2006. Scotland was leading the rest of the UK and CEC employed around 35 people, including students working towards academic awards as well as doing research work.

But it all slowed down in 2007/8 after the new First Minster decided to remove the ring-fence from the recycling funding and allowed councils to use it for delivering other municipal services. Within a year or two, the university took the view that waste management didn’t really fit in with their aspirations for its future direction.

And so, when soon afterwards Scottish Government announced their intention to stop funding CEC and set up Zero Waste Scotland (ZWS) instead, there was little resistance from the university. Those researchers on contracts were let go and the remaining permanent staff were re-allocated to other teaching duties.

It’s thought that ZWS now employs over 120 staff. Have they made a difference?

Its proposed deposit return scheme (DRS) has been postponed again but is understood to be based on a German scheme that has actually increased the consumption of large capacity plastic bottles.

VAT rules (that apply to the 20p deposit and were well-known before the DRS project began) have so far proved insurmountable. Little thought seems to have been given to the treatment capacity being able to cope with the increased tonnages of material a DRS might generate, or the fact some of these ‘increases’ will simply be due to the diversion of recyclate already being collected at the kerbside.

When a former Environment Secretary announced a ban on the landfilling of untreated municipal waste from January 2021 (since postponed), she clearly wasn’t aware that it would mean thousands of tonnes of our waste would have to be hauled to England, causing increased costs for Scottish businesses never mind hikes in council tax charges.

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ZWS’s latest report, The Biostability of Organic Waste and the Associated Carbon Impact Implications, was actually prepared by an English-based consultancy: funded by ZWS.

By all accounts their latest (updated) Strategy on Litter and Fly-Tipping contains nothing much new. The fact that these are two separate problems that need different solutions seems lost on them.

Meanwhile, Scotland’s waste recycling performances have been stuck in the doldrums for the last few years.

Would all this have happened if CIWM advisers had still been involved? We’ll never know.

The author spent over four decades in the Scottish waste industry