How Edinburgh cleaned up its act on litter

Nearly a fifth of its public spaces, according to a gold-standard survey, were unacceptable littered.

And that is not counting the mess generated by a highly publicised bin strike.

Yet by last year the capital had turned itself around. Edinburgh has moved from being the dirtiest place in Scotland to become its cleanest major city.

READ MORE: What Scotland's most detailed litter survey tells us about our towns and cities

How? What did the council do to clean up? Was it just more money on street cleaning?

Not quite. Scott Arthur is the councillor in Edinburgh in charge of bins and street-cleaning. And he stresses his administration - amid all the financial pressures local authorities are facing - did spend more.

“We identified that the staff who are working in this area for us were actually doing quite a good job,” he said. “But they needed a little bit extra resource. 

“So we so we invested in the staff. And now, across the board, I think our waste and cleansing team does relatively well. 

“If you look at things like our kerbside collections, etc, in terms of our missed non rate is one of the lowest, particularly for our comparators. So everything's moving in the right direction. In the the most recent budget round we allocated, more money to target waste and street cleansing.”

Arthur is about to stand down as a councillor - he was elected as MP for Edinburgh South West at the general election last month. 

His minority Labour council administration, which depends on support from other parties to govern, did decide to devote more resources to litter and bins. 

Edinburgh is spending more. But it was also spending differently. It is quietly re-prioritising poorer neighbourhoods. And this really matters when it comes to how

The capital’s official cleanliness score has climbed dramatically, from 82.2% in 2021-22 to 90.6% in 2023-24, according to the data from the Local Environmental Audit and Management System or LEAMS. 

What is LEAMS? Well, it is a series of spot-checks on nearly 13,000 sites  across the country carried out every year in three waves by charity Keep Scotland Beautiful (KSB).

READ MORE: Messiest public spaces: How badly littered is your part of Scotland?

Crucially, this is not just an inspection of main roads or shopping drags. KSB workers get right in to communities, measuring accumulations of litter in all sorts of different settings.

The data they collect shows there is much more litter in poor places than rich ones.

In areas deemed best off - that is the highest quintile or 20% in the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation - some 97.7% of inspected sites were ruled acceptable. Only 0.2% were described as heavily littered.

Contrast that with those for the most deprived quintile. Only 80.1% of such spots were acceptable. Fully 4.9% were heavily littered.

Litter, anybody familiar with the topic suggests, is unbelievably complicated. It is about how and what we consume and it is about our behaviour. But it is also about public policy, not just big ticket issues like the now aborted Deposit Return Scheme but even micro-decisions about where to clean up. Do councils neglect poor communities? They usually deny this. But are there subtle ways that resources are re-directed from deprived neighbourhoods to wealthy ones? Arthur thinks so.

“One of the things are quite open about is often is that where the council is failing most is in areas of deprivation,” he said. “We have taken steps to give more emphasis on areas of deprivation, just to make sure they are not left behind. 

“And that's caused a little bit of tension in the council, to be honest, because the Conservatives backed something called Scrub My Streets, which was an idea where residents could phone in where they wanted additional work done. and then the council would then target areas where a lot of these calls were made. But I think what we recognised was that while that's not necessarily a bad thing, there was a danger in that. 

“There's some evidence that shows that people in more affluent areas tend to complain more. So if we went down that road, what we'd be doing is just placing less emphasis on areas of deprivation. So we decided really to be quite careful about that approach and focus more on deprivation.”

Edinburgh is a major, major tourism destination. That brings significant challenges for litter collection: visitors generate waste. But it also puts pressure on local authorities to keep their main holiday spots clean. 

Has Edinburgh over the years got this balance right?

Arthur stressed that the biggest tourism drags had to be looked after. 

READ MORE: What Sweden can teach Scotland about recycling and cleaning up our litter

“We want these places to feel good, for visitors and for people going for shopping and their leisure as well. 

“But, I think  in the past that maybe the balance wasn't always in the right direction.

“What we're trying to do is just correct it a little bit. 

“I'm really proud of Edinburgh and when visitors come here, I want our city to look good. So we have to get that right. 

“But we also want to make sure that across the city people feel being respected by the council.”

Arthur said he comes across citizens who just think the council does not care about their area. 

Major tourism centres across the world are struggling with litter. Arthur recently took a trip across the continent and was struck by some of the issues he saw, not least in Italy’s capital. 

’Rome,” he said, “oh my goodness, it does not work at all. Even in the Vatican the bins were overflowing. If you look at the sheer number of people it is always going to happen.”

Edinburgh last week approved a visitor levy, a continental-style tourism tax, designed to mitigate some of the consequences of mass tourism. But how does the Scottish capital compare? There are no international measures like LEAMS. But Scotland has not yet got the kind of problems faced in some other parts of Europe or North America.

Yet there are common trends, common throwaway cultures, common public health challenges.

Edinburgh’s nadir came in 2021-22, when local authorities across the developed world were struggling to deliver basic services amidst a global pandemic.

Councils and private landowners had to make tough decisions about rubbish. They managed, mostly, to collect the bins. They were not able, for example, to kill weeds on roads. And that created traps for litter, for trash blown from bins or dropped from car windows.

As The Herald on Sunday revealed yesterday across Scotland litter levels have fallen since the pandemic. But they have not recovered to the levels seen before Covid.

Edinburgh’s figures are now approaching the Scottish average. Dundee - despite making improvements of its own - now tops the table of Scotland’s most littered council area. It narrowly pipped Glasgow to the title. Both cities, of course, have high concentrations of the deprivation correlated with messy streets.