Dr Scott Arthur

I agree with my hon. Friend. I know that it is important to his constituency, because I can remember how people were really concerned about plastic cotton buds getting washed up on Portobello beach. Thankfully, through changes, that is now much rarer, but it is still an issue. In Scotland alone it is estimated that we generate around 300,000 tonnes of plastic packaging items annually and, as of 2021, we were recycling only about 4,500 tonnes of that. Each month, Scotland exports about 100 tonnes of waste to different parts of the UK and right across the world. That is an export that I am not proud of. Poor planning on the part of the Scottish Government means that, by the start of next year, 100 tonnes of waste a day will be moving from Scotland to England to be processed. That is clearly not sustainable, but it seems that we have become all too comfortable recycling being a matter of “out of sight, out of mind.” We have to remember that once we lose sight of our waste, in many cases we also lose control of what is happening to it. Many residents write to me about that. Even if we were to develop the processing capacity at home, dealing with plastics will always be a problem so long as our consumption remains high, so a much stronger focus needs to be placed on reuse and developing a circular economy, as we heard earlier, not just in Scotland but throughout the UK. In my constituency, I am proud to say that I have several organisations that promote reuse, ranging from sharing libraries to repair and reuse charities. I recently spent an afternoon touring one such venture called The Forge, a pop-up community maker space, based in renovated shipping containers on a site in Fountainbridge, next to the canal and just along from my office. It provides tools, facilities and training to people from all walks of life, including students, artists, do-it-yourself enthusiasts and homeless people. When I visited, there was a young man making a hat block. I thought it was for him to store his hat on, but he intended to make a pirate hat for a pirate festival, of all things. I tried to google where the pirate festival was, but it turns out that pirate festivals are quite common, so it could have been almost anywhere.