The draft Area Waste Plan for Tayside is set to take a major step forward over the next month.

Colin Anderson, SEPA Dundee Team Leader and chair of the Tayside Waste Strategy Area Group said: “The draft Area Waste Plan for Tayside was consulted on during the summer and comments from both householders and industry have now been incorporated into the draft plan. SEPA has also carried out an integration exercise to look at all the waste plans throughout Scotland to ensure that the plans compliment each other and to investigate whether there are opportunities for joint working.

“During October 2002, the finalised Tayside Area Waste Plan will be presented to the relevant committees of Angus, Dundee City and Perth & Kinross Councils. The draft Area Waste Plan is a blueprint for the way household waste should be handled in Tayside over the next 20 years. It mainly highlights the need to limit the amount of waste produced and to significantly increase the amount of waste we recycle.

“If the Area Waste Plan is approved, we can then start to implement the proposals in Tayside. Approval of the plan will then allow the three Councils to make a bid to the Strategic Waste Fund that has been set up by the Scottish Executive in order to help finance the implementation of such plans.

“After a number of years in the planning, I believe that everyone involved in the development of the plan now wants to move forward and start to see some real progress on the ground in the way waste is dealt with on Tayside.”




ENDS

Notes to Editors

• SEPA has a duty under the Environment Act 1995 to produce a national waste strategy for Scotland that will be developed through the implementation of 11 Area Waste Plans for the whole of Scotland. These aim to show how waste will be dealt with for the next 20 years and will ensure that Scotland meets the requirements of a variety of EU directives. The plans aim to reduce the volume and hazard of waste, increase recycling and re-use, and reduce the dependence on landfill. This should reduce environmental impacts whilst creating new jobs, better use of resources and a cleaner local environment.
  
  
• In Scotland we are heavily reliant on the landfilling (tipping into holes) of waste. Average household recycling levels were 5 per cent in 2000, putting us at the bottom of the European league of recycling.