The Waste Aware Fife campaign and the kerbside recycling service for 54,000 households in West Fife have both been funded by a 5.4 million award from the Scottish Executive's 230m Strategic Waste Fund.
 Ross Finnie and the Dobson family of Inverkeithing, who will be participants in the new kerbside scheme |
Scottish local authorities are aiming for a national recycling and composting target of 25% by 2006.
Launching the scheme, Mr Finnie said: “Fife had one of the lowest recycling figures in Scotland, but I am pleased to hear that recent estimates suggest the figure is now 15%. We all produce waste, so we all have a responsibility for it. In the past, it has been all too easy and cheap to send our rubbish to landfill. We now have to start looking at alternatives.”
The three-year awareness campaign is being run by the Scottish Waste Awareness Group (SWAG) in partnership with Fife Council, the Fife Environmental Trust and the reprocessor Smith Anderson.
Commenting on the Fife project, SWAG campaign manager Nicki Souter said: “All the signs are that the schemes will be a real success and ultimately the result of this will be less of Fife's waste ending up in landfill sites – something that we hope to emulate across Scotland.”
Research in the Fife area revealed that 92% of people there were willing to take part in a kerbside recycling scheme. The blue bin recycling scheme is expected to divert about 15,600 tonnes of material from landfill each year. It will cover Dunfermline, Inverkeithing, Lochgelly and Cowdenbeath.
Fraser Thomson, head of environmental services at Fife council, said: “We are very proud of the fact that we are one of the first local authorities in Scotland to implement our area waste plan. We and our partners have worked hard in the past months and whilst today is a milestone, we are all eager to get the campaigns underway and get more and more local people participating in recycling across Fife.”
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