Delivering Scotland's circular economy: Proposed Circular Economy Bill - Consultation analysis

2. Profile of Respondents

The consultation received a total of 1,681 responses. However, 10 responses (1%) were excluded from this analysis because they were blank.

This means that a total of 1,671 responses have been included in this analysis. 137 respondents (8%) gave permission for their responses to be published with their name/organisation and 252 gave permission to be published without their identifying details (15%). The list of the individuals and organisations that responded to this consultation and consented to their responses being published is presented in Appendix 2 – List of organisations.

The sources of these responses are set out below and summarised in Figure 1.

• Citizen Space responses: responses received via Citizen Space. 315 responses (19%) were received through this platform.
• Non-Citizen Space responses:
  • Organised campaign responses: responses received via e-mail campaigns. One campaign was identified for this consultation: Friends of the Earth Scotland. 1,333 organised campaign responses (79%) were received, out of which 1,319 standard responses (99%), where the respondents had simply added their name to the standard text provided by the campaign organiser without making any changes to it, and 14 non-standard responses (1%), where the respondents had edited the standard text provided by the campaign organiser or added their own comments to it before submitting it. Please note that we were not able to provide the split between organisations and individuals for this type of responses due to the methodology used (see Section 3.2).
  • Other e-mail responses: responses received via e-mail that were not part of an organised campaign (e.g. local authorities’ responses). 33 other e-mail responses (2%) were received.

Table 1 provides a summary of the respondents and responses.

For the purposes of this analysis and in line with the Scottish Government’s approach to analysing consultation responses, each response to this consultation was treated as equal in weight. This means for example that each standard campaign response was counted for individually and that organisations responding on behalf of their members were counted as one response even though they might have been representing multiple individuals.