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The Scottish Government is developing a tool to assess the carbon impact of all government spending in Scotland. This tool will be based on the guidance recently issued by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) on how to value greenhouse gas emissions in government appraisals using the Shadow Price of Carbon. Further information on the Defra guidance is available at:

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The Scottish Government intends to consider setting targets for waste in these sectors as part of the review of the National Waste Plan.

No. The Landfill Allowance Scheme (Scotland) Regulations 2005 set maximum amounts of biodegradable municipal waste that can be disposed of by local authorities to landfill each year and any penalty liabilities that are notified by the Scottish ministers under the regulations fall to the local authorities themselves. In any event, the distribution of year-on-year allowances has only been set up until 2010 and none of the local authority plans envisaged delivery of infrastructure before this time.

The Scottish Government will provide local authorities with record levels of funding over the period covered by the spending review 2008-11. The vast majority of the funding, including the former ring-fenced Strategic Waste Fund, will be provided by means of a block grant. It will therefore be the responsibility of each local authority to allocate financial resources to meet its obligations, needs and priorities.

In addition to this, Scottish Government''s spending plans for the period 2008-11 included an allocation of £154 million to the Zero Waste Fund. The proposed expenditure across Scotland is £41.1 million in 2008-09; £54.4 million in 2009-10, and £58.7 million in 2010-11. Around £50 million of the total will be spent on support of delivery bodies but the remaining £100 million is intended to be spent on putting the necessary infrastructure in place to meet our longer term waste targets post 2010-11. A short-life working group will shortly be established between Scottish Government and COSLA to determine how this financial resource should be best deployed.

The targets announced in my statement on 24 January 2008 were combined targets for both recycling and composting of municipal waste. The review of the National Waste Plan will consider the case for separate composting targets.

The government''s intention is that energy from waste plants should have efficiency levels of at least 60%. However, the government recognises that in some cases developments such as planned housing or factories to take the heat generated by the energy from waste plants may not be in place when any plants start to operate. In these cases, the government would expect the operators of the plants to have clear plans in place to use the heat once other developments are in place. The operators would, of course, be expected to develop facilities capable of utilising waste heat at the outset.

Yes the Scottish Government does intend to agree specific targets on waste with each local authority, principally to ensure that each local authority diverts sufficient biodegradable municipal waste from landfill in order for Scotland to meet its EU Landfill Directive obligation in 2010 and also to ensure that each local authority contributes to National Indicators 39 (amount of waste going to landfill) and 32 (ecological footprint) within the Scottish Government''s National Performance Framework.

Scottish Government will seek to ensure that local authorities contribute towards the National Performance Framework by agreeing local outcomes to be included in their single outcome agreements (SOAs).

The previous administration, in Technical Notes relating to spending reviews, used a definition of recycling, including organic waste which is composted, contained in the Producer Responsibility Obligations (Packaging Waste) Regulations 1997. This definition is that recycling means the reprocessing in a production process of the waste materials for the original purpose or for other purposes including organic recycling but excluding energy recovery.

As the Government indicated in the Parliamentary statement on waste on 24 January 2008, we will ensure that the new National Planning Framework reflects the government''s key objectives on waste.

The proposed content of the Scottish Sustainable Procurement Action Plan is with the cross-sectoral Public Procurement Policy Forum for comments. Their views are being considered at present.