Glasgow slow to go green with poor recycling rates GLASGOW is lagging far behind the rest of Scotland in environmental performance with less than a fifth of all waste being recycled, new figures show.

Glasgow slow to go green with poor recycling rates

GLASGOW is lagging far behind the rest of Scotland in environmental performance with less than a fifth of all waste being recycled, new figures show.

Despite some improvements and initiatives in recent years, the city is still the lowest of all mainland councils for recycling both household and commercial waste.

In 2008-09 Glasgow City Council managed to recycle just 16.4% of household waste, less than half the Scottish average and the lowest in the country.

For years Glasgow has had disappointing levels of domestic recycling, previously put down to the number of tenement properties making collection difficult.

However, despite the city investing in more blue recycling bins for tenements, its success rate is still significantly lower than elsewhere.

For other materials, including commercial and building waste, Glasgow also remains well behind the rest, with complaints that collections for businesses are inconvenient and costly.

Less than 20% is recycled, well short of a target set by the Scottish Government of 30%. Only two other councils failed to meet the targets set for them, Aberdeen scored 32.4% and Inverclyde 28%, and they had tougher standards to meet than Glasgow.

The city is improving its recycling record and an enormous amount of material is processed at council recycling plants but too much goes to landfill.

Glasgow recycles 74 tonnes of aluminium cans - almost five million a year - and collects more than 400,000 tonnes of waste from homes and businesses. However, only 80,000 tonnes goes to recycling plants and the rest to landfill, costing the council millions of pounds a year in penalty charges.

Glasgow has, however, almost doubled its household recycling total in the last four years from only 8.4% in 2005, but in the last year managed only a 1.3% increase.

South Ayrshire has the best record for recycling household waste with almost half going to recycling plants (48%).

For other waste, Clackmannanshire is top at 44.9%.

Glasgow is looking at a financial burden of more than £40million a year in cost and charges for excessive use of landfill.

But as first revealed in the Evening Times, it is pinning its hopes on a new 'steam cooker' system at its Polmadie waste plant in the city's South Side.

The £40m machine would heat and sort waste into recyclable materials, then compost the rest to organic material for use in city parks.

The plan involves the Scottish Government providing £10m, a private partner £20m and the council £10m.

Across Scotland an estimated 22.6m tonnes of waste is generated every year, with 19.6m tonnes coming from commerce and 3m tones from homes.

Last year the Scottish Government set new, ambitious targets for recycling by councils.

Environment Secretary Richard Lochhead announced a minimum of 50% by 2013 with the ultimate aim of a zero-waste Scotland.

At the same time the government established a Zero Waste Fund of £150m to be spent over three years to support recycling and composting infrastructure.

Glasgow City Council said it is taking action to improve on the poor performance and hopes to transform its position from worst in Scotland to best.

James McNally, executive member for land and environmental services, said: "We are developing proposals to fund and build a facility to treat 150,000 tonnes of waste for recycling markets."

He added that the city council wanted to "take Glasgow to the top of the recycling leagues".

Stuart Mackinnon, of the Federation of Small Businesses Scotland, said: "These figures reinforce our research suggesting more small firms are trying to recycle at least some of their waste but there are significant barriers for firms wanting to recycle.

"More needs to be done to expand recycling facilities for small firms, particularly expanding roadside kerbside collections."

In the last four years a push to improve performance has led to around 100,000 households in Glasgow now having access to kerbside recycling collections and around 80% of tenements have communal blue recycling bins for paper, cans and plastics.

There are also more than 300 recycling sites.