What this means for the area is described below.

Waste Prevention
The need to prevent and reduce the amount of waste being produced has never been stronger therefore this forms a fundamental element of the National Waste Strategy: Scotland. Waste-prevention tools include pre-product design, changes to management and production processes and the development of clean or wasteless technologies.

Waste-prevention initiatives must address two distinct waste streams:

• household waste;

• commercial and industrial waste.

The main impacts to be gained through waste prevention, in the MSW stream, are through addressing packaging waste. Individual awareness of the environmental and economic impacts of excessive packaging needs to be raised. Suitable purchasing by individuals can help; excessive packaging should be reported to the Trading Standards Office of the local authority, who have a responsibility to pursue this matter.

Whilst home composting is not, strictly speaking, waste prevention, it does reduce the amount of biodegradable material from entering the collection system. As the biodegradable fraction of household waste is in the order of 60%, there is clearly considerable benefit to be derived from dealing with this fraction of the waste at source.

The National Waste Strategy Scotland sets a target for the reduction of municipal waste arisings by 1% per annum. At 1998 levels, assuming a zero rate of waste growth, this would equate to a decrease approximately 3,000 tonnes per annum. This would not be offset by the declining population figures (averaging 0.17% per annum across the area over the period mid 1998–mid 2020). Further, as pointed out, if the change in waste production is more strongly influenced by the number of households, than by population changes, the anticipated rise in household numbers (averaging 14% across the area for the period of the plan) could amplify the required tonnage reduction proportionately.

A number of specific programmes relating to the prevention/reduction of the amount of waste being produced at source have been instigated across the WSA. Details of these are covered in Section 4 under non-MSW.

Reuse and Refurbishment
Traditional reuse and refurbishment activity has declined in recent years as the cost of replacing consumer durables has fallen in relation to the cost of repair. However, as well as removing items from the waste stream, reuse and refurbishment are linked to job creation and economic improvement and there remain opportunities for stimulating activity at a local level.

Reuse and refurbishment can operate at a variety of scales, from local jumble sales and car boot sales up to national organisations such as Oxfam charity shops. There are many initiatives within the Waste Strategy Area for the reuse of household goods. However, these could be developed and co-ordinated to enhance their effectiveness.

As well as waste-management industry players, local community recyclers have an important role in developing reuse and refurbishment projects. The Recycling Advisory Group Scotland (RAGS), in acknowledging the importance of the community recycling sector, is working to establish a community recycling network in Scotland. This network will offer support and practical advice to community recyclers spreading best practice and experience.

Recycling and Composting
Recycling is the separation of a material for processing followed by preparation and sale onto a market to replace an existing virgin material. As such there are often numerous environmental benefits, such as reduced air emissions, reduced impacts of extraction, energy savings lower disposal impacts and more efficient use of raw materials. There are often other benefits such as encouraging producers to take responsibility for their wastes and economic benefits such as improved competitiveness or greater employment opportunities.

Composting is the aerobic decomposition of organic material to produce a stable material containing organic matter and plant nutrients. There are often benefits in applying this material to land, including nutrient addition, improved soil structure and improved water retention.

At this stage only a generic BPEO has been proposed. Until such time as each of the local authorities identifies how it intends to implement that BPEO, we can only repeat the generic observations made in Section 3, namely; that composting and recycling led options will only deliver the later diversion targets under the most favourable circumstances of low waste growth and maximum participation and materials yielded. As stated previously, the model assumes the availability of markets for the materials and that the materials will be taken up by that market. This ignores possible quality issues regarding the suitability of the materials recovered for recycling and or composting (as well as the current changing legislative and environmental enforcement regime for these materials). More importantly, it ignores Scotland's lack of a recycling infrastructure. A key strand of the National Waste Strategy Scotland is to develop both the infrastructure and sustainable markets for recyclates. A strategy that pursues the early delivery of these materials without a mechanism linking their delivery to the development of the markets runs the risk of creating a glut of materials and possibly destabilising the emerging markets and facilities.

Other Recovery
Other recovery involves recovering part of the energy value from waste, for example by burning or thermally treating the waste directly (e.g. incineration) or by burning a fuel produced by the waste (e.g. refuse-derived fuel or landfill gas). The energy conversion efficiency of the plant will depend on the specific design, e.g. recovery of energy through combined heat and power (CHP).

For historic reasons, mass burn incineration plants have a poor reputation in the UK. They also tend to need expensive pollution control equipment to meet modern air emission standards and, if large-scale plants are built as the only or main technology for waste treatment, may result in a mixed waste treatment system that lacks flexibility to include other types of waste recovery.

The future of energy from waste may lie with emerging technologies such as pyrolysis or gasification. These have been proven in a range of applications such as coal gasification, tyre processing or biofuels, but are not proven in the UK for the treatment of a mixed household and commercial waste stream. Such technologies may also require careful waste pre-treatment.

In terms of what may be subject to such processes, consideration must be given to the nature of the materials going to the process. Some fractions of the waste stream are non-renewable resources, for example, plastics and, arguably, some paper waste. Long term we will need to be able to reuse or recycle these. Aluminium and ferrous waste will not enhance the thermal performance of a plant and should be recovered prior to processing. Whilst a limit has not been set on tonnage of waste that can be thermally treated, adherence to a recycling and composting emphasis leading to 2010 will be a limiting factor on the quantities available to thermal treatment processes.

It is envisaged that, long term, thermal treatment for recovering the energy value of the waste will be for that fraction of the waste that is renewable.

SEPA consulted on their 'Guidelines and approach to thermal treatment plants and energy from waste' in the summer of 2002, and these guidelines will be reviewed in light of the consultation before final launch.

Waste Collection and Disposal
The disposal and operational details for each of the local authorities have been covered in Section 1.

All the local authorities operate a mixed household and commercial waste collection service. All the authorities have standardised their collection systems on 'wheeled bins' (garden refuse collection, special lifts, etc., have not been standardised). This traditionally provides the most cost-effective means of quickly and safely gathering large quantities of waste without the labour intensive requirements of a sack or manual bin systems. A few such systems are retained in special localised circumstances.

Full details of the methods and costs of operating these services are best found in the Audit Commission's Report on value for money in local authority waste collection system services, entitled 'Benchmarking Refuse Collection' published in April 2000.

In terms of the types of vehicle used for mainstream waste collection, existing vehicles may well be used or there may be a change to introduce more compartmented vehicles to segregate the wastes into their different streams. However, the number of refuse collection vehicles dedicated to kerbside collections may substantially increase depending on frequency of uplifts from householders, and what type (if appropriate) of segregated collection is used. This means there is obviously a requirement for expansion of existing and construction of new waste management facilities. This requirement for expanded and new infrastructure is discussed below.

Materials Recovery Facilities (MRFs)
In order to prepare received waste for reprocessing, the waste, whether source segregated or not, may have to be delivered to material recovery facilities for sorting, quality checks and bulking. Two distinctly different types of material recovery facilities will have to be considered by the local authorities in delivering their provision of the BPEO within the area.

Clean MRFs
This type of facility takes in the elements of the waste which have been segregated at source, i.e. from banks or bring schemes and from separate kerbside collections, where householders place the recyclable material in a separate wheeled bin, bag or box from their general waste.

As there will be, typically, cardboard, paper, metal, textiles and plastics mixed together from kerbside schemes, they have to be sorted in this type of facility into their constituent parts (glass may well have to be collected separately from other wastes). This can be done manually or automatically or using a combination of both. Typically, the reject rate would be in the order of 3-6% of input.

'Dirty' MRF or Mixed-Waste Process Facilities (MWPFs)
This type of facility is less common, due to the absence of proven technology for separation. However, an intrinsic part of this type of facility will be a pre-treatment phase, to prepare the waste for manual and automatic sorting. The major benefit of such a facility is that it requires no change in the existing collection infrastructure. The attraction to this type of process is that 100% of the waste is available and that there is no reliance on public participation. This lack of public involvement does mean that the process is regarded as 'socially exclusive'. MWPF can accommodate the material recovered through survival bags. This type of collection is through the traditional route, where segregated materials are placed in a bag, which is included with the mainstream collection, to be removed later. This type of process gained a poor review under the option appraisal due to both these factors and costs.

The received waste can be treated by a process such as autoclaving, composting or drying. In these processes the fibrous element is screened off, for use as a fuel or for biological treatment, such as composting or aerobic digestion. The remaining elements of the waste are separated either manually or by electro-mechanical means or a combination of both.

Landfill disposal sits at the base of the waste hierarchy for the following reasons:

• Potential pollution to land, air and water.

• It is a waste of resources and is considered to be unsustainable.

Landfill will, however, continue to form part of an integrated waste-management system of treatment and disposal of residual for the foreseeable future.

Recycling Market Development
It is clear that if Scotland is to make better progress in recycling, significant effort must be made to develop both national and local indigenous markets for recycled materials. Refer to Chapter 3.