So, despite Lorna Slater’s repeated and increasingly exasperated insistence that DRS is “definitely going ahead” in August as planned, it looks like a miracle or two may be required if the Scottish Government is to deliver its flagship environmental policy on schedule.
According to reports in The Scottish Sun and The Times in Scotland, the UK Government will categorically refuse to grant an opt-out from the UK’s Internal Markets Act. This means the DRS regulations could not be enforced for single-use packaged drinks from elsewhere in the UK. In basic terms, this would put Scottish producers at a competitive disadvantage because only products bottled in Scotland would be subject to the 20p deposit.
Bizarrely, Holyrood hasn’t even asked for an exemption yet according to the same reports.
As if that wasn’t problematic enough, all three candidates in the race to replace Nicola Sturgeon have said that they would postpone or change the Scheme, should they become First Minister.
So what lies ahead? It certainly looks like DRS is dead in the water, at least for the time being. One of the most likely scenarios is that it will return in 2025 as part of a unified scheme with our friends down south, something that most industry colleagues had been asking for from day one.
The complexities of running two (different) schemes side-by-side were immense, something that the major producers have been flagging up for years. But the Scottish Government ploughed on, keen to be the first in the UK to implement a DRS, but failing to put in place the requisite infrastructures, systems and procedures. The upshot is that lots of businesses have had to spend vast sums of money preparing for August.
Interestingly, however, I spoke very recently to one senior executive from a major soft drinks producer who basically said that his business would be prepared to “suck it up” and absorb the sunk costs so far if it meant that DRS was implemented in 2025 as a unified scheme, rather than a standalone Scottish scheme.
What should have been a landmark development for Scotland and its people and something that we could all have been proud of has crumbled into an unedifying debacle. Let’s hope when it comes to DRS 2 we learn from the many errors of the last four or five years and finally deliver the world-class cost-neutral system we were promised.
Antony Begley, Publishing Director, SLR
Is the end of DRS in sight?
So, despite Lorna Slater’s repeated and increasingly exasperated insistence that DRS is “definitely going ahead” in August as planned, it looks like a miracle or two may be required if the Scottish Government is to deliver its flagship environmental policy on schedule.
According to reports in The Scottish Sun and The Times in Scotland, the UK Government will categorically refuse to grant an opt-out from the UK’s Internal Markets Act. This means the DRS regulations could not be enforced for single-use packaged drinks from elsewhere in the UK. In basic terms, this would put Scottish producers at a competitive disadvantage because only products bottled in Scotland would be subject to the 20p deposit.
Bizarrely, Holyrood hasn’t even asked for an exemption yet according to the same reports.
As if that wasn’t problematic enough, all three candidates in the race to replace Nicola Sturgeon have said that they would postpone or change the Scheme, should they become First Minister.
So what lies ahead? It certainly looks like DRS is dead in the water, at least for the time being. One of the most likely scenarios is that it will return in 2025 as part of a unified scheme with our friends down south, something that most industry colleagues had been asking for from day one.
The complexities of running two (different) schemes side-by-side were immense, something that the major producers have been flagging up for years. But the Scottish Government ploughed on, keen to be the first in the UK to implement a DRS, but failing to put in place the requisite infrastructures, systems and procedures. The upshot is that lots of businesses have had to spend vast sums of money preparing for August.
Interestingly, however, I spoke very recently to one senior executive from a major soft drinks producer who basically said that his business would be prepared to “suck it up” and absorb the sunk costs so far if it meant that DRS was implemented in 2025 as a unified scheme, rather than a standalone Scottish scheme.
What should have been a landmark development for Scotland and its people and something that we could all have been proud of has crumbled into an unedifying debacle. Let’s hope when it comes to DRS 2 we learn from the many errors of the last four or five years and finally deliver the world-class cost-neutral system we were promised.
Antony Begley, Publishing Director, SLR
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