Scottish Waste Environmental Footprint Tool (SWEFT)

We live in a climate crisis and need to introduce measures that can effectively help us tackle climate change and transition from a linear economy - where we ‘make, use, dispose’ - to a circular economy where everything has a value and nothing goes to waste.    

To help achieve this, it’s important to measure the life-cycle impacts of waste. This includes extraction, manufacturing, production, transport, recycling, and disposal.  

Looking at the life-cycle of waste provides a broader picture of the impact different materials are contributing to environmental damage.  

We know that the climate crisis is not just about carbon emissions. There are other impacts too – like biodiversity loss, rising pollution levels, and the depletion of natural resources, like water.  

We need to look at all of these to enable a broader understanding of the environmental impacts of our waste and the overconsumption of raw materials. This is why we’ve developed the Scottish Waste Environmental Footprint Tool.

As with its predecessor, the Carbon Metric, SWEFT includes the impacts of waste generated during the upstream production process, such as raw material extraction and manufacturing, and during waste management. Any benefits of waste treatment, for example due to recycling, are also included.

It is an evolution of the Carbon Metric, a pioneering development in the monitoring of waste impacts.  However, unlike the Carbon Metric, SWEFT expands our knowledge by combining the carbon impacts of waste with the results of other environmental damage indicators including: 

• Climate change (carbon emissions)
• Biodiversity loss
• Air pollution
• Water consumption
• Mineral resource scarcity
• Land use

SWEFT shows that there is an adverse environmental impact associated with the materials and products that households waste in Scotland, with different waste streams having different relative impacts across various environmental indicators. 

Textiles, food, Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE), plastic, and paper and cardboard are the most problematic waste streams from the perspective of climate change, biodiversity loss, air pollution, mineral resource scarcity, water consumption, and land use. 

Recycling remains a valuable step towards reaching climate goals, such as net-zero, but reducing how much we waste, by consuming less, reusing and sharing, will have the biggest impact on the reduction of environmental damage.