Draft circular economy strategy: strategic environmental assessment

5 Maximisation of benefits, mitigation of negative effects, and monitoring

5.1 Maximisation of environmental benefits and mitigation of unintended consequences

All Strategy priorities and associated actions should be implemented in a way that minimises environmental harm in order to maximise the benefit of the positive environmental impacts identified in section 5. For example:

1. Adoption of lifecycle assessments for buildings should not be limited to GHG emissions, but should also consider wider environmental impacts including biodiversity loss.

2. Manage additional infrastructure requirements needed to enable circular economy practices in a way that avoids unnecessary negative visual impacts, e.g. the storage of reusable materials should be located somewhere that will not have a significant negative impact on the landscape.

3. Food waste collection services should be designed in a way that balances practicability and efficiency with the mitigation of negative visual impacts on streetscapes.

4. Repair and reuse should continue to be prioritised over the recycling of textiles, avoiding the potential unintended consequence of making it easier to recycle used textiles than to keep them in use.

5. Promoting the use of electrical vehicles and making them more affordable to purchase second hand and maintain should be coupled with the promotion of active travel and public transport as preferable options under the transport hierarchy to ensure personal vehicle use is not given preference over more sustainable travel.

5.2 Monitoring

5.2.1 Monitoring

The Strategy shares its vision and outcomes with the circular economy monitoring and indicator framework (CEMIF). The CEMIF is being developed to monitor the long-term impacts of the Strategy, and future iterations of the Strategy. The CEMIF is intended to allow the monitoring of progress towards Scotland’s long-term circular economy goals. It contains a set of high-level indicators that can be used to understand progress towards specific priorities.

The CEMIF attaches indicators to the outcomes of the Strategy to provide a high level overview of Scotland’s progress to creating a more circular economy at a national level. It is the first national-level indicator framework specifically developed for the circular economy in Scotland.

The CEMIF includes the monitoring of the environmental impact of material use in Scotland, for example, through the measurement of GHG emissions from waste management, the carbon intensity of materials consumed in Scotland, and the biodiversity impact (both domestically and abroad) of our resource use. It should be noted that the framework is still in development at the time of writing, and indicators are subject to change.

The framework will also be a starting point for the development of future targets which will be developed by 2027, recognising that not every indicator will be suitable for targets given limitations on data and influence. A separate development and consultation process will be put in place for targets following the publication of the framework.