Edinburgh wakes up to the bin strike hangover

The slate grey skies hanging over Edinburgh this morning matched the mood of a city left bedraggled by a 12-day bin strike.

From dawn, the flashing orange glow of bin lorry lights punctured the gloom as cleansing crews got the mammoth task of clearing up the mess under way.

Kerbside collections in the suburbs have restarted but the biggest activity was in the city centre where squads of council workers got to work removing piles of waste.

The day after the Edinburgh festivals finish traditionally leaves the city centre with a hangover feel and the big clear-up added to that vibe.

And it was not just a case of emptying the bins - the debris accumulated around them was an even bigger task for the crews.

As the waste was brushed, scooped and shovelled off the ground, the 12-day smell really hit home with commuters taking wide berths around the operation.

The scale of the dumped waste also made for slow progress.

A young refuse collector told BBC Scotland the first couple of hours of the clean-up had been a "nightmare".

He had been dealing with one mountain of rubbish in the West Port for more than an hour and had filled a street bin four times, which was being emptied by a mechanical bin loading lorry.

The driver of the kerbside loader told BBC Scotland that he was driving one of two nine-tonne capacity vehicles in the city centre, with more heading out to the suburbs.

He said his young colleague would be "exhausted within an hour at this rate" and that a one-hour job was taking four hours.

He said it was the worst he had ever seen the city for rubbish and that they would not have the city clean by the end of their 12-hour shift.

Another refuse collector described how long it had taken to clear a 100m (330ft) stretch of the city's Forrest Road.

He said: "We have just taken five hours to clear the pile of rubbish around the bins in Forrest Road and around the very small block there.

"I don't know when we are going to get all this done as there is just so much rubbish."

Later in the day, cleansing staff in the West Port said it was "disgusting" work.

One told BBC Scotland: "Nobody else wants to be jumping about in this but a lot of the public have been shouting thank you so that's nice.

"It's been an eye-opener for a lot of folk because I don't think they realised how much rubbish gets put out in the bins.

"The strike has been hard, we've all lost money but you have to lose a bit of money to make a bit of money."

Solidarity for refuse workers from city residents has been evident throughout the strike action and in the Newington area, a woman came down from her tenement flat to wish the three-man crew emptying the overflowing communal bin next to her home all the best.

The refuse workers BBC Scotland spoke to were very much directing their anger at the "hopeless" council umbrella body Cosla and the pace at which pay talks have progressed this year.

One, who asked not to be named, said they would be "lucky to have everything sorted by the time the next strikes begin" - pointing out it was the waste that has been blown away from the bins that was the real environmental hazard.

By the afternoon, house wheelie bins were being emptied in suburbs in the south of the city - although the larger residential bins outside tenements were untouched.

Elsewhere in the city, a pub where staff members cleared up some of the strike mess has been daubed with graffiti.

A red hammer and sickle was spray-painted on one window of the Biddy Mulligans pub in the Grassmarket area, while the word "scab" was written on another.

A refuse collector told BBC Scotland he had not seen the vandalism at 05:00 on Tuesday but he had seen it an hour later when he went past the pub again.

Johnny, who works in the pub, told BBC Scotland it was a "disgrace".

He said: "All we did was bag the rubbish, we didn't interfere with the strike as we did not take the rubbish to landfill or anything like that.

"A mound of rubbish like that is bad for business. We did not undermine the strike."

Another staff member, who wished to remain anonymous said: "It's childish. We were just tidying up."

Staff used nail varnish remover to clean the graffiti off the window panes before a workman arrived at lunchtime to paint the wooden sills green again.

The staff added that they were going to check CCTV footage before speaking to the police about the graffiti.