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1 Report Context
Mike Pringle
MSP (
www.mikepringlemsp.com)
tabled a Members Bill in the Scottish Parliament for a
Member's Bill to enable local authorities in Scotland to
impose an environmental levy on specified plastic bags
[Pringle]. If passed, this legislation would cover all
plastic bags provided by retailers at point-of-sale or from
other outlets. The inspiration for this bill was taken from
the experience of the plastic bags levy (the so-called
PlasTax) in the Republic of Ireland.
The Scottish Executive commissioned this brief study
from
AEA Technology Environment and
associates in order to investigate and assess the range of
environmental, business and consumer impacts related to the
proposal to introduce a plastic bag levy in Scotland. In
doing so, other potential options or variants on the
proposed levy have also been researched.
In this study, we used the Irish definition of a
lightweight plastic carrier bag,
i.e. 'any bag made wholly or in part of
plastic, suitable for use by a customer at point of sale in
a supermarket, service station or retail outlet'. Heavier
weight plastic carrier bags, the so-called 'bags for life',
costing more than €0.70 (around £0.48) are excluded from
the Irish levy.
This Volume of the report is structured as follows:
Section 2 sets out background information on the various
types of carrier bags and why they would be subject to a
potential levy.
Section 3 presents an assessment of the views for and
against a levy based on experiences from around the world
and from a variety of stakeholders.
Section 4 presents the life cycle assessment (
LCA) analysis undertaken for different
plastic bag levy scenarios. As well as the bill tabled by
Mike Pringle, we assessed scenarios that looked at the
effect of applying the levy to paper bags as well as
plastic bags and focusing only on larger retailers. No new
LCA was undertaken for this report.
Instead, the results from other suitable
LCAs were adapted with Scottish data to
show the relative environmental effects of a levy or
variants thereof.
Section 5 analyses the impacts a levy would have on
consumers and businesses.
Section 6 reviews and comments on levy collection and
impacts on local authorities.
Section 7 presents our conclusions.
Volume 2 of the report contains the following
Appendices:
Appendix 1 reviews international
experience.
Appendix 2 provides details of the retail
context.
Appendix 3 provides details on the
LCA approach including the sensitivity
analysis.
Appendix 4 provides graphs on the
distribution of revenue to local authorities.
References are designated in square brackets,
e.g. [
CBC].
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