Litter crisis? What litter crisis? asks cleansing chief
SCOTLAND’S litter problem has worsened during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a leading environmental charity.
Around 5 per cent of streets in Glasgow had ‘unacceptable’ levels of rubbish in 2014-15 but that soared to almost 18 per cent following lockdown.
However, the SNP-controlled city council’s head of parks and ‘street scene’ says he does not believe the city faces a crisis ahead of the United Nations COP26 climate change conference in November. Stephen Egan said: ‘I have heard comments saying it is a filthy city. I have heard comments that there is a cleansing crisis.
‘I see very little evidence that would support those particular views.’
Keep Scotland Beautiful (KSB) monitors levels of litter, fly-tipping and dog-fouling. In 2020-21, 10,000 sites were surveyed and the overall Scotland-wide street cleanliness score fell by 2.1 per cent. About 80 per cent of sites were blighted by litter.
KSB grades councils on cleanliness and more had lower scores in 2020 than the year before. The worst-performing council was Edinburgh, where a 92.9 per cent score in 2019-20 fell to 81.8 per cent in 2020-21. In Falkirk a 90.8 per cent score in 2019-20 dropped to 81.1 per cent a year later.
In Glasgow, the city scored 82.5 per cent, down from 85.4 per cent in 2019-20.
It has been claimed the littering problem is more visible now after Glasgow – along with other local authorities – decided to prioritise domestic bin collections over streetsweeping and litter-picking.
Mr Egan added: ‘We had staff who had to shield... staff who were frightened to come to work. As a consequence, we had to take some staff off our streets and a lot of parks and put them to deliver the absolutely essential services.’
At a recent council meeting, it was reported that Mr Egan’s cleansing department was toiling under an absentee rate approaching 20 per cent.
He said: ‘Levels of attendance are not where we had hoped and expected them to be. So, we are having to move resources about and engage agency staff.’