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Yes.

I can give a high-level view. There will be variation. Some local authorities collect glass through kerbside collections. In some areas, such as mine, people do not get a kerbside collection of glass but go to whatever drop-off point the authority has put in place. There is value associated with the material that is recovered, although there may be local authorities that do not do any recycling of glass. The economics point will be variable around Scotland.

On the material difference, I will hand over to Haydn Thomas, but it is important to say that it was our intention to have glass in the scheme. An aspect that was convincing for me was the amount of broken glass that we have in our town centres and on our streets and our beaches. If there was a value associated with taking a glass bottle back, we would be less likely to see broken glass. I felt that the safety element was a strong case for the original regulations, as well as the economic argument.

The most important thing for us is the recycling rates. It will be economical. I will hand over to Haydn Thomas to take you through that, but the biggest saving relates to the materials—the recovery of the plastics and aluminium that will be associated with the deposit and return scheme. That represents a larger saving for society and indeed for our local authorities given their clean-up operations. Will we see a situation in a few years’ time where politicians will go to beach cleans and not see drinks containers any more? There will be a material impact on the amount of litter and the amount of clean-up that local authorities are charged with doing.

The powers will enable regulations requiring developers—

This is a direct response to developers’ lack of accountability to communities. By law, developers will have to engage with communities and we will set out in secondary legislation the parameters of what we demand that engagement to look like. It is a direct response to the lack of accountability that, rightly, these community groups have been putting to us for many years.

I will just briefly respond to Sarah Boyack. I appreciate her point. It is important that the public understands the changes that are taking place with regard to our joint efforts in progressing a polluter-pays principle and reducing the amount of associated packaging. I think that that is something that really exercises people.

The beauty of EPR is that consumers will not have to do anything. It is the producers that will need to act, and we hope that they will reduce the amount of packaging. Local authorities will get money for dealing with the packaging as well.

This is one of those instruments in which we are not necessarily asking for any behavioural change from consumers, but they will, I hope, see a big impact with regard to what they buy for their households. We all go into schools in our constituencies. Young people, who are concerned about litter, climate change and our carbon footprint, regularly bring up with me the amount of packaging on products that they and their families buy in shops. I am hopeful that this instrument will lead to a real change in that over the years to come.

I definitely do not have that information in front of me just now, but we can do an assessment of that. SEPA will be aware of the exact number, and we can certainly get it to the committee, but I do not have it in the information that is in front of me. I am looking at my officials, and I do not believe that they have it either.

No, I am afraid not. It was too good to be true.

If that is the feedback from anaerobic digestion companies and operators, I will take it away and put it directly to SEPA myself.

A number of pieces of work are being done on this particular issue, but an awful lot more work and research still needs to be done. For example, Scotland’s Rural College is developing tools for land managers to reduce ammonia emissions; the work involves a process of communication with land managers so that we can get good practice on this, and I want that to be developed and disseminated among land managers before we consider anything associated with regulation.

The project will also provide us with evidence to demonstrate the benefits of mitigation measures on commercial farms and to support the identification of future regulation that might have to be introduced. The EU is looking at ammonia emissions, too; again, we will keep a watching brief on that with regard to alignment, but by the end of next year, the EU will have assessed whether there is a need for further regulation of the ammonia emissions associated with livestock. Of course, we are not waiting to see what happens in the EU, as important as that is—we are doing work in that area with the agricultural college.

Obviously, we want best practice on reducing ammonia emissions to be followed voluntarily before we consider whether anything might need to be done through regulation. That work is going on at the moment.

SEPA has not requested additional money for that. It is able to do it within its existing budget.