John Crawford, FCIWM, asks what can the UK DMO learn from the Scottish DRS debacle?
The new UK Deposit Management Organisation (UK DMO) has the benefit of avoiding the pitfalls of one of its predecessors. The DMO needs to look no further than the Scottish Government’s embarrassing experiences with Circularity Scotland in 2023 which provided the perfect template for what not to do.
It’s not clear just how much public money Circularity Scotland squandered on this project – that most sectors of the Scottish Waste Industry had forecast to be unworkable within days of its unveiling.
Estimates vary between £120-140 million, excluding an outstanding £100 million court case brought by a disgruntled contractor over the award of a contentious haulage contract that was subsequently abandoned.
Scotland’s deposit return scheme (DRS) had originally been mooted several years earlier with promises that it would ‘boost recycling’; ‘deal with our litter problem once and for all’; and ‘create thousands of new jobs’.
However, closer scrutiny revealed that in fact most of the ‘new jobs’ would simply replace existing jobs that had been created over two decades earlier when Scotland’s 32 Councils developed individual bespoke kerbside recycling schemes and dramatically increased the country’s recycling rates.
The tonnages of recyclate that Circularity Scotland expected to handle appeared to include a lot of material that was already being collected by the Councils at the kerbside.
Ignore the cheerleaders who rehearse the baloney: ‘DRS works well in other countries so why not here?’
A few Councils said that if their current tonnages of collected recyclate was significantly reduced by a new DRS, the resultant loss of income from the sale of product would make their kerbside services financially unviable.
Others commentators pointed out there already was a well-established system for getting kerbside recyclate bulked up and sent to the reprocessing outlets and there was no need for the contentious haulage contract whatsoever.
But as the project had by then been handed over to a Green MSP, she was apparently allowed to drive her DRS forward (including the recruitment of 45 staff for Circularity Scotland) until the wheels came off the wagon.
So what can the UK DMO learn from the Scottish DRS debacle?
Firstly, ignore the cheerleaders who rehearse the baloney: ‘DRS works well in other countries so why not here?’ In most cases they aren’t comparing like for like;
Secondly, any new DRS must complement our existing kerbside recyclate collection services rather than compete with these.
Bear in mind that when Scotland introduced kerbside recycling, at East Ayrshire Council, we expected to see an adverse impact on bottle bank tonnages but it didn’t happen.
The tonnages of glass already being deposited at bottle banks didn’t reduce significantly (as had been expected) and it was thought that kerbside collections were capturing glass that had previously been put in with residual waste.
Thirdly, sit down and listen to all the sectors who were involved in getting our existing recycling performances to where they are. The Scottish Government made a fundamental mistake in appointing a Chief Executive who had neither expertise nor experience in municipal waste recycling and proved to be unable to deliver the promise the Minister had made publicly. There’s a lot of cutting edge technologies under development that can identify containers in the MRFs that need to be harnessed.
Fourthly, come clean and admit that no DRS can make any perceptible impact on the UK’s appalling litter problem. That’s a totally separate issue and needs a completely different approach.
Lastly, don’t make it too complicated, you need people to participate in any scheme for it to work effectively.
Time will tell if the UK DMO gets it right this time, but if they don’t, they can’t say they weren’t warned.