It is Scotland’s shop window, the nation’s biggest tourist draw, its picture postcard capital. But three years ago Edinburgh was also the filthiest place in the country. Nearly a fifth of its public spaces, according to a gold-standard survey, were unacceptable littered.
And that is not counting the mess generated by a highly publicised bin strike. Yet by last year the capital had turned itself around. Edinburgh has moved from being the dirtiest place in Scotland to become its cleanest major city.
READ MORE: What Scotland's most detailed litter survey tells us about our towns and cities How? What did the council do to clean up? Was it just more money on street cleaning? Not quite. Scott Arthur is the councillor in Edinburgh in charge of bins and street-cleaning. And he stresses his administration - amid all the financial pressures local authorities are facing - did spend more.
“We identified that the staff who are working in this area for us were actually doing quite a good job,” he said. “But they needed a little bit extra resource. “So we so we invested in the staff.
And now, across the board, I think our waste and cleansing team does relatively well. “If you look at things like our kerbside collections, etc, in terms of our missed non rate is one of the lowest, particularly for our comparators. So everything's moving in the right direction.
In the the most recent budget round we allocated, more money to target waste and street cleansing.” Arthur is about to.