Opinion: Glasgow recycles just 26% of its rubbish – and blaming residents misses the point
South Ayrshire manages 55%. Glasgow manages half that. Blaming residents is easy, but the real problem is a system that makes recycling hard for people living in tenements.
Recycling bins. File photo. · Photograph: Richard Webb (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Glasgow has a lot to be proud of. Its recycling rate is not one of those things.
New figures from Sepa show Scottish households recycled 42.8% of their waste last year, the lowest level in five years and miles away from the 70% target the Scottish Government set back in 2010. Glasgow managed just 26%. South Ayrshire, by comparison, hit 55%.
It would be easy to blame Glaswegians for not trying hard enough. That would be unfair, and it would miss the point.
A tenement problem
Most of Glasgow lives in flats. When you live three floors up with a shared back court, recycling is not a matter of wheeling a blue bin to the kerb. It means carrying bags down stairs to communal bins that are too often overflowing, contaminated or missing altogether. Anyone who has seen a back court after a missed collection knows why people give up.
The council's bin hub programme is a genuine attempt to fix this. Almost 700 hubs are now in place, serving around 21,000 homes, with bigger, better-sited bins at the front of buildings. That is welcome. But the roll-out has been paused for evaluation, and the next phase is not due until April 2027. For a city that is so far behind, that feels slow.
Burning instead of recycling
There is a bigger national issue too. Scotland has shifted from landfill to incineration, and less waste is being buried. But campaigners at Friends of the Earth Scotland argue, with some justification, that new incinerators have taken away the pressure to recycle. Zero Waste Scotland's own research suggests more than half of what goes in black bins could be recycled. Every one of those bags burned is a missed opportunity.
Meanwhile, the deposit return scheme for bottles and cans, which works well elsewhere in Europe, has been delayed again and again. Councils still collect different materials in different ways, so a family moving from one side of the boundary to the other has to learn new rules.
What should happen next
Glasgow does not need another lecture. It needs a system designed for the way people in this city actually live. That means speeding up bin hubs, sorting out missed collections and making recycling easier than throwing everything in one bag.
The Scottish Government, for its part, needs to stop missing its own targets and set a clear, consistent approach for every council. Setting targets is the easy part. Meeting them takes planning and money.
Twenty-six per cent is not good enough for Scotland's biggest city. But with the right investment, there is no reason Glasgow cannot catch up.