About us
We are your charity for Scotland's environment, with a vision for a clean, green, sustainable Scotland.
We're lucky to live in such a beautiful country and we want to keep it that way.
We have three goals - to combat climate change, tackle litter and waste, and protect and enhance the places we live, work and visit.
We know that we can’t make a difference on our own, so we work with you to enable positive change.
Our work supports the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Join #TeamKSBScot to help us keep Scotland beautiful.
Find out how we:
Combatting climate change
We are faced with a climate emergency and we all need to make changes now to protect the future of not just our country, but for the whole planet. Scotland has an ambitious target to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2045, and we work to support this target through awards, education and community engagement.
Education is vital to help people make good decisions for our environment. To help people understand the climate crisis, we run Climate Emergency Training for various audiences including youth workers, community groups and secondary schools – our Climate Ready Classrooms programme is being delivered to half the secondary schools in Scotland.
Our Eco-Schools Scotland programme is part of the largest sustainable schools programme in the world (run by Foundation for Environment Education or FEE) and enables schools in Scotland to take action on climate change and Learning for Sustainability and to attain the international Green Flag Award.
In 2021 we developed Scotland's Climate Festival to inspire community led climate action and communication.
We run the FEE's international Green Key programme in Scotland – an eco-label which supports, recognises and awards environmental excellence in hotels and tourism venues.
On behalf of the Scottish Government, we ran the Climate Challenge Fund to empower communities to take action on climate change for over a decade.
We also run FEE's Young Reporters for the Environment programme for Scotland, which gives young people a platform to voice their concerns about our environment. Another of our programmes is One Planet Picnic, which encourages people to consider food which is good for you and good for the planet.
Tackling litter and waste
Scotland is blighted by litter, dog poo, flytipping. These are issues that have got so bad that Scotland is now facing a litter emergency. Our country, our wildlife and our people deserve better, so we work tirelessly on with communities, local authorities and businesses to keep our country beautiful and make our spaces clean, green and healthy.
Our Clean Up Scotland campaign helps people across the country to clean up the places they care for. And our Upstream Battle initiative focuses on the River Clyde to understand and raise awareness of how litter ends up travelling from land to our seas.
Through our My Beach, Your Beach campaign we raise awareness of how litter, along with dog and gull poo, can affect the water quality of our seas, particularly those we want to swim in.
We provide annual audits and reports to local authorities on the cleanliness of our cities, towns and villages, providing a Scotland-wide picture of the quality of our local environments.
Our throwaway society creates lots of waste, both in the making of and the disposing of singles use items that are hard to recycle, and can often become litter. Our Cup Movement in Glasgow draws attention to single-use cups and encourages individual behaviour change as well as encouraging businesses to sign up to a cup recycling scheme.
Protecting and enhancing the places where we live, work and visit
The impact of the pandemic during 2020 has shown many of us how important our local places and spaces are. They support our health and well-being, as well as providing an opportunity for exercising and socialising.
Through Scotland’s Beach Award and the Green Flag Award, we celebrate and promote clean, well managed beaches and parks. And our two community environmental improvement programmes, Beautiful Scotland and It’s Your Neighbourhood allow local communities to improve and enhance their local places and celebrate their achievements.
Our natural, built and cultural heritage is very important, so we work with local communities to recognise the value of their heritage and encourage and support work to conserve what is there. And we help boost life and work chances whilst protecting our nation’s heritage through our career opportunities.
We support and work with businesses and organisations to help them improve their environmental performance through our National Award for Environmental Excellence®, looking at all aspects of environmental impact from carbon emissions through to the management of internal and external spaces.
