Welcome to Green Alliance's podcast.

We are the charity and think tank that is all about achieving ambitious leadership for the environment.

I'm Libby Peake, Senior Policy Advisor on Resource Stewardship.

We spent a lot of time recently talking about Duffres Resources and Waste Policy, its first for more than 11 years. And during the first few months of the year, the resources sector in England, and sometimes beyond,

was kept very busy responding to a number of consultations.

We thought extensively about overhauling the producer responsibility system for packaging waste,

reflected on how to improve the consistency of recycling collections from households and businesses,

and debated the merits of having a deposit return system for drinks containers.

The Duffer civil servants, in turn, have since been kept busy analysing the hundreds of thousands of responses they've received to these consultations,

and have just recently confirmed their proposed reforms are still on the cards for 2023.

But Waste and Resources Policy is a devolved matter in the UK,

and so while England is just considering how deposit return scheme would work,

Scotland announced in January that it would definitely be having one,

and set out its overarching design in May,

with the deadline of bringing in the system by 2020.

With time ticking away towards that imminent deadline, we thought it was an opportune moment to travel north of the border and to discuss what would need to happen, to not only make a success of such a scheme in Scotland, but also how the country can create a world-leading recycling system in future.

To open the discussion, our chair for the evening, Scottish journalist and broadcaster

Leslie Riddick, set out the current challenges and opportunities we face when it comes to

handling our resources.

Obviously, deposit return is happening.

The consultation has been, probably within two years, we will have a system of kinds.

The legislation should come in later this year.

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