Every year Glasgow lifts twelve thousand tons of street rubbish - that’s bulk uplifts of folk’s old settees, beds and the like, and bad-lot fly-tipping dumped wherever. That’s nearly two hundred and fifty tons a week - a rubbish mountain that sometimes never seems to clear. Well, hopefully no longer.

On June 1 Glasgow launched a new service - the high-tech Environmental Task Force (ETF).

At its heart will be 30 rapid-response van teams dedicated to making our streets clean and keeping them that way. I believe the ETF can revolutionise the way the city is maintained. The more skeptical of Glasgow’s residents might say that they’ve heard all this before. Fair enough, but this time round we aim to make a real difference to the way the city looks and to keep it that way.

So what’s different about this new approach? Firstly, there will be dedicated teams across the city that will be flexible enough to respond to problems quickly. Cleaning the city has now gone digital because the rapid response will be co-ordinated by an operations centre in Bridgeton, which looks like the Star Ship Enterprise. Staff there will be responding to the usual phone line complaints but also to tweets and Facebook messages from Glasgow’s residents, as never before. Why not follow us on Twitter @theenvtaskforce or give us a like on Facebook at ‘envtaskforce’.

The teams responding to calls to action will also co-ordinate clean up operations in all the local areas of the city. The city’s 21 wards will be grouped into four ‘Task Force Cycles’. An ETF team will arrive in a ward each week and work on that area before starting the whole process again in another ward the following week.

There has to be a partnership between the people of Glasgow and the council to make this work. I am certain that it will because the vast majority of Glaswegians have great pride in the city.

That said, those who continue to be poor neighbours and dump what they don’t want anymore wherever they fancy or let their dogs foul without cleaning up behind them, will pay the price in more frequent fixed penalties. We’re planning to unite our traffic wardens, dog fouling patrols, litter wardens and taxi officers into a more coherent enforcement team. Of course that’ll take time but in the not too distant future don’t be parking your 4x4 on the zigzags outside the primary school because the lollipop man or woman just might be an enforcement officer who’s able to dish out a fixed penalty notice.

The city council can no longer do everything on its own. That’s why at the official launch of the Task Force, late in May, more than a 100 committee members from Glasgow’s housing associations turned up at the City Chambers’ Banqueting Hall to make pledges of partnership for the new deal.

For some, words have already been turned into deeds. Milnbank Housing Association in Glasgow’s East End already has a partnership to be proud of with the City’s Cleansing Service. That’s a model for many more to follow.

That prompts me to make another thing clear. The ETF is not a replacement for the city’s main rubbish collection service. It won’t replace the normal bin collections. That will remain the gigantic operation it is. Every year Glasgow empties 23 million bins. That’s three hundred thousand tons of rubbish a year. The Task Force will be a targeted strategic add-on to all of that.

I’ll give the last word to Jamie Beautyman because he’s one of the 75 trainees who are going to work on the ETF training programme for the next year. Hopefully by the end of that year Jamie will be ready for a new job. So will the other trainees which is another reason why the ETF is different. Jamie says the Task Force has given him a second chance. He wants to make his family proud of him. He wants to get a new job at the end of his training so he can look after them. Good luck Jamie.