Recycling is declining in Edinburgh due to ‘manky’ and overflowing’ bins, says councillor

A councillor has blasted recent figures showing a decline in recycling insisting “manky” and “overflowing” bins are putting residents off the good deed.

The newly-released study has shown Edinburgh is recycling less of its overall household waste than it used to two years ago.

The figures, released by Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA), show the Capital only recycled about 39 per cent of its waste in the last year compared to 41 per cent in 2017 and 45 per cent in 2016.

Aberdeen came top after it recycled an impressive four per cent more of its rubbish in the last year compared to 2017.

Green councillor Gavin Corbett slammed the figures, branding the decline in recycling household waste in Edinburgh as “unacceptable”.

“The big challenge, for a city with so many flats and tenements, is the on-street communal bin service,” he said.

“As long as packaging bins are overflowing and food waste bins manky, the message to residents is off-putting.

“The current communal bin review needs to tackle that head-on.”

During last week’s Transport and Environment Committee he strongly criticised Edinburgh’s declining recycling performance.

“For the council to be hovering around the 40 per cent mark, well behind Aberdeen, when the SNP-Labour administration has a 60 per cent target is simply not acceptable,” he said.

But according to him, recycling is only part of the city’s problem.

“The real prize is preventing so much waste in the first place,” he continued.

“Consumers can do a bit by choosing products with less packaging, but retailers and manufacturers need to massively up their game.”

Environment Convener Councillor Lesley Macinnes said the council is finalising a review of the communal bin service to make recycling easier for people in the city.

“Our mission is for every street to have the full suite of recycling options available, regardless of whether they’ve got shared on-street bins or individual kerbside ones,” she said.

The recycling rates, according to her, are trending down due to a variety of reasons including less paper sent for recycling, a higher proportion of waste sent for energy recovery (both energy from waste and refuse derived fuel), challenges in the international recyclables market and the overall drop in waste tonnages.

Yet Edinburgh has succeeded in reducing its waste sent to landfill and its carbon impact, according to the SEPA data.

Cllr Macinnes said the opening of Millerhill Recycling and Energy Recovery Centre, the city’s new waste plant, will improve Einburgh’s carbon footprint.

She added: “Crucially, the carbon impact per person in the city is falling and will fall substantially again once the 2019-20 figures are available now that our Millerhill Recycling and Energy Recovery Centre is on stream, processing 155,000 tonnes of waste that would otherwise have ended up in landfill and generating enough power for 32,000 homes and businesses.”

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