National litter and flytipping strategy: baseline report

Introduction and overview

Every year 26,000 tonnes of material is flytipped in Scotland^[8]. Along with being a visual disamenity, impacting the local environment and carrying a significant clean-up cost, flytipping (along with litter) represents a significant leak from the circular economy whereby the materials are incorrectly discarded or disposed of, sending a poor message about their value and limiting opportunities for recycling. They are a wasted resource and do not reflect Scotland’s ambitions to become a circular nation.

Making changes to the way in which data is collected, recorded, and reported will help to demonstrate the scale of the problem and allow for better targeting of enforcement action. It is vital that a baseline is determined so that progress can be measured. SEPA is leading the development of a national baseline for flytipping across Scotland as part of the Year 1 Action Plan^[9] for Scotland’s National Litter and Flytipping Strategy^[10].

The aim of this project was to establish a flytipping baseline for Scotland, allowing for an assessment of data gaps and evaluation of what changes may be needed in the future.

In order to establish a flytipping baseline for Scotland, the following data was sought:

• The number of flytipping incidents reported, by local authority area, size, waste type, time period; and
• Enforcement actions including Fixed Penalty Notice (FPNs), Fixed Monetary Penalty (FMPs), Variable Monetary Penalty (VMPs), prosecutions and convictions and other enforcement actions.

Data on flytipping incidents

In Scotland, there no comprehensive, nationally reported data on flytipping incidents, so it is challenging to gather a full picture of flytipping trends and whether incidences are becoming more prevalent. Data is disparate and incomplete, meaning establishing flytipping trends and patterns across Scotland has historically not been possible. Data is currently collected via a number of different mechanisms including Police Scotland and local authorities’ own internal systems (this is not always published). On top of this the public could previously report flytipping incidents through the national reporting service, Dumb Dumpers. This service has now closed.

The use of different systems (especially while Dumb Dumpers was active) also means, that in some cases, instances may have been reported more than once, leading to a lack of accurate data. In addition, some instances may be reported by two people, however, this double counting risk is somewhat mitigated as some local authority systems remove duplicates.

Data on enforcement actions

Data on enforcement actions is also not published in full. The Scottish Government publishes key data on the number of people prosecuted and convicted in the Scottish Courts for flytipping offences and the main disposal route, and SEPA report on their enforcement actions. While data is published by the government and SEPA, data on local authority enforcement actions is not collated and reported on nationally. This means that there cannot be a full assessment of enforcement actions across Scotland for flytipping incidents. Like incident data this means progress cannot be tracked and trends cannot be identified.