Good evening! This week's edition of the In Common newsletter comes from Craig Dalzell, head of policy and research
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The DRS is back in the news now that Keir Starmer — in yet another show of policy innovation — has decided to copy/paste the previous Conservative Government’s plan for a deposit return scheme — the proposal where you pay a small deposit when you buy things like drinks and receive the money back when you return the packaging to a deposit return machine (sometimes known as a “reverse vending machine”).
His plan includes the previous plan to exclude glass from the scheme and he has refused to allow an exemption to the Internal Markets Act that would allow Scotland to both include glass and to introduce the scheme at all without having to wait for the UK to do it.
It really is impressive to me how the UK can be so backwards that it is utterly unable to bring in a circular economy scheme that is already near-ubiquitous across central Europe (and used to be common in Scotland if you’re old enough to remember Barr’s "gless cheques" before they ended their scheme in 2015), and utterly baffling how vulnerable we are to lobbying by companies who want to keep dumping the costs of their pollution onto consumers and the environment.
I’ve told this story many times but I remember being in an informal roundtable in Holyrood in the early days of the planning for the Scottish scheme and a representative from a major supermarket and a representative from a major multinational drinks company both argued against the concept of DRS.
Both went a bit more silent when I mentioned that in my previous holiday to Prague I had personally deposited a drinks bottle made by the latter into the DRS machine hosted by the former. If they can do it in one country, why not another?
As I say – it was never about “could”, but about “why should we, when we profit more by not doing it?”
So why do I say that the Scottish Government are wrong too (other than the fact that they wanted to take public waste disposal out of Local Authority hands and both centralise it and privatise it to an American private equity firm that is now suing them for their failure to deliver)?
Yes, they included glass bottles in their proposed scheme but it was quite crucially only ever about recycling those bottles — breaking them down, remelting the glass and making a new bottle or other glass product. Glass is a great material for that. Barring issues with colourants or other adulterants in the glass (don’t recycle your great-gran’s uranium plates please), glass can be remelted and remade quite easily without degrading in quality the way plastic does.
But there’s an even easier and more efficient way to turn an old bottle of Irn-Bru into a new one — wash the bottle and refill it.
That’s the element that was missing from the Scottish scheme. Rather than a proper Circular Economy approach to waste management, the Scottish Government focussed, and are still focussed, mostly on just recycling.
It’s very different in other countries that have a DRS. If you’re in, for example, Germany and order a glass bottle of beer or water in a restaurant, look closely at the shoulder of the bottle.
You’ll almost certainly see the scuff marks that herald its passage — multiple times — through the machinery of the DRS system. Bottles can be used and reused this way dozens or maybe hundreds of times before accident or attrition takes its toll and the bottle goes into recycling.
Indeed, I don’t even know why I have to explain this concept to politicians. If you ordered a pint glass of the same beer, would you expect the glass to be put in the recycling bin after you’re done?
Of course, there is something else that happens in Germany. While there are still single use containers (typically things like soft drink cans but also smaller plastic bottles), they pushed the idea of multi-use containers as a priority (both plastic and glass).
These bottles are designed to a standard shape and size as well as other constraints like the thickness of the material, type of glass used etc. This industry-wide standardisation allows a bottle that contained, for example, one kind of beer to be refilled with another kind without issue. All it took was the Government to regulate the industry to make it so.
The regulations are offset with a lower deposit (Pfand, in German) on the more reuseable containers than the single-use ones — encouraging manufacturers to get on board with more sustainable options. This advantage is lost if everything just goes into the same recycling bin.
Yes, that kind of regulation is probably also a breach of the Internal Markets Act, but the Scottish Government simply haven’t been pushing for that kind of exemption and the UK Government isn’t going to deliver it of their own accord either.
So what we’re going to end up getting is a Conservative recycling scheme, born from public pressure but watered down as far as possible by lobbyists for multinational corporations who already do things better elsewhere, copied and pasted by UK Labour and meekly followed by the SNP.
It’s almost like the policy is more reusable than the bottles will be.
