What a load of rubbish City third dirtiest council area
GLASGOW is the third dirtiest council area in Scotland, according to Keep Scotland Beautiful. The agency caries out environmental audits on all 32 councils and monitors levels of litter, dog fouling, fly-tipping, flyposting and graffiti.
Colin Edgar, director of Communications for Glasgow City Council, said on TV on Wednesday that Glasgow was not the dirtiest city in Scotland and not even the dirtiest in the central belt.
Speaking to STV, Scotland Tonight, he was referring to the Keep Scotland Beautiful annual survey.
Mr Edgar said: “People have issues with litter, undoubtedly they do.
“But Glasgow is not the dirtiest city in the world, it’s not the dirtiest city in Britain, it’s not the dirtiest city in Scotland, it’s not the dirtiest city in the central belt of Scotland.”
Asked what city is dirtier, he said: “According to Keep Scotland Beautiful, which measures these things, Edinburgh is dirtier than Glasgow. This isn’t a competition. Cities have environmental problems, Glasgow has environmental problems.”
Based on its environmental quality surveys at a random selection of sites Keep Scotland Beautiful found Glasgow was ranked 30 out of 32 council areas.
For 2020/21 it achieved a cleanliness score of 82.5%. It was marginally better then Edinburgh at 81.8% and ahead of Falkirk, which was lowest at 81.1%
Glasgow was lagging behind the other two main cities with Dundee scoring 91.2% and Aberdeen 93.7%.
Keep Scotland beautiful said the pandemic has had an impact on council resources as has longer term budget cuts.
It said: “The Covid-19 pandemic had a significant impact on the ability of local authorities to carry out street cleansing and litter monitoring duties, as well as on our monitoring. This should be taken into consideration when analysing long term trends.”
However, the trend showed that Glasgow was becoming less clean before the pandemic hit.
In 2018/19 the city achieved a cleanliness score of 86.7% the following year 2019/20, which takes us up to the end of March 2020 at the start of the pandemic, it had fallen to 85.4%.
During the pandemic year it fell even further to 82.5%.
Keep Scotland Beautiful said there had been an increase in sites with “unacceptable amounts of litter” across the country in the last year.
Cigarette ends are the most common litter type and food and drink packaging litter is common, particularly single-use disposable food and drinks packaging
The most deprived areas continue to have higher litter levels than less deprived areas.
The cleanliness of the city has been raised as a concern as Glasgow is hosting the COP 26 summit next month.
Mr Edgar said that was relevant to the overall aim of the summit and won’t deflect from the ambition to agree on a deal to tackle climate change.
He said: “We need to deal with these issues and we are dealing with them, but these issues are not relevant to whether we are ready to host COP. The world leaders who come here are not going to say ‘good lord this is dirtier than Paris’, it’s not. ‘This is dirtier than Rome’, it’s not ‘and because its dirty, because I’ve seen some graffiti, I’m not going to get a deal.”