Will common sense prevail?

DRS remains, and should always have been, a glorious opportunity for our sector to play a key role in achieving something truly special, truly game changing for the many communities we serve across Scotland. No one has ever doubted that, if we could get it right, DRS could be up there with our finest achievements as an industry.

The problem is, it very much looks like we’re not on course to get it right. DRS is seriously at risk of descending into farce – and from where I’m sitting it all comes down to one thing: planning. Or rather, the lack of it. We’ve had literally years to get our rPet plastic ducks lined up on this one – and the entire supply chain has long been flagging up the monumental hurdles the industry faces in delivering a workable DRS. It’s a monster of a project for everyone involved.

Yet with only about nine months to go until D-Day, we’re still not much closer to answering the key questions – and we’re rapidly running out of time. And what happens when you leave the big decisions until too late in the game? You invariably get bad decisions and low-quality compromises. It should have been simple: local retailers are the obvious choice for return points. There’s more of them than there is of any other type of business. And it had to be cost-neutral, as repeatedly promised. No one would have expected local retailers to have to subsidise the scheme. Couldn’t be simpler.

Establishing a suitable handling fee was always going to be a thankless task, mainly down to the sheer impossibility of calculating a fee that works across the board. But a little more engagement with retailers, large and small, before publishing the proposed fee would have gone a long way to allaying fears.

So we are where we are with a legal challenge and a last-gasp rethink on exemptions which looks suspiciously like it’s designed to provide those pesky retailers with an easier way out and stop upsetting the apple cart. All we were asking for was what we were promised: cost neutrality, or at the very least, something that looks vaguely like cost neutrality.

We can only hope that some common sense prevails, and we can find a way to get everyone pointing roughly in the same direction. We all want DRS to work. We all want to play our part. But you have to meet us halfway.

This should have been a life-affirming celebration and something we could all be proud of. It still can be – but we’re running out of time.

Antony Begley, Publishing Director