Fife traders would be allowed to put their bins out for just an hour a week under a scheme mooted by St Andrews councillors to tidy up town centres.
Inspired by the system used in Edinburgh, Councillors Frances Melville and Dorothea Morrison have proposed shops, restaurants and other businesses be given slots of an hour for their rubbish to be uplifted.
Outside those times, bins would be stored off roads and pavements.
Fife Council agreed to consider Mrs Melville’s suggestion that Fife emulates Edinburgh’s Right Time, Right Place initiative.
She learned about the scheme during a recent presentation on efforts to keep St Andrews’ streets clean when she asked how other university towns deal with the scourge of overflowing bins.
The system, she said, could be adopted in urban areas across the region so visitors and residents no longer had to put up with the sight and smell of bins cluttering town centres.
She said: “Edinburgh obviously also got fed up with the appearance on the streets of the unsightly commercial waste bins and decided enough was enough.
“Businesses have to store them within their premises.
“They have a time slot and at no time outside that can any commercial waste be stored on public land or on the roadway or roadside.
“The result is there are now no commercial bins in Edinburgh cluttering up the streets for any length of time.
“Surely it’s not impossible for Fife seriously to consider this system, which Edinburgh adopted in 2015.”
Backing her call, Mrs Morrison said: “This is a very exciting system that seems to be working well in Edinburgh.
“The St Andrews councillors have spent years trying to tackle unsightly bins, both residential and commercial, littering our streets so decided this is a system we would like to introduce to the town as a pilot and hopefully roll out in other urban areas of Fife.”
Ken Gourlay, the council’s head of assets for transportation and environment, said: “We are aware of the Edinburgh scheme and have confirmed to Councillor Melville that we’ll look into this further.”
The suggestion follows the launch in the summer of the St Andrews Green Squad tidy-up volunteers by business improvement district BID St Andrews and St Andrews Environmental Network.
