Work to cut plastic waste in ‘reverse’

Scottish ministers fear that work to cut environmentally damaging single-use products has been “pushed into reverse” during the pandemic.

Environment Secretary Roseanna Cunningham said she had “real concerns” over the “rapid return” of disposable items such as plastics during the public health crisis.

In recent years the Scottish Government had been taking action to try to address the nation’s “throwaway culture” by moving to ban the likes of plastic straws, plastic-stemmed cotton buds and the manufacture and sale of microbeads.

The crisis is feared to have undermined that work in a number of ways, including a reduction in recycling rates during lockdown and a rise in demand for pre-packaged food and takeaways.

Giving evidence to Holyrood’s environment committee yesterday, Ms Cunningham highlighted the issue as she warned that not all of the recent public behaviour changes had been positive.

She said: “One of my real concerns, and we will all have seen it, is the rapid return to singleuse items and a kind of, regrettably, careless disposal.

“So there are some real issues there, where we were making really good headway, and we were building in some fantastic behavioural change, which to a greater or lesser extent has now been pushed into reverse.”

She told MSPs the government needed to identify “aspects of the behavioural change which we will want to sustain, and the aspects which we will not want to sustain”.