It looks like a miniature plastic dustbin: black, round and squat. It sits in a corner of Martin Bartos’s Glasgow flat. When he lifts the lid there is an earthy, though not unpleasant, odour. This is a wormery: home, beneath a layer of potato peelings and coffee grounds, to about 1,800 live earthworms.

“It’s not for everyone,” Bartos, 34, a psychiatrist, confesses. “But they really aren’t any bother. They don’t smell, but they do dramatically reduce the amount of waste you put in landfill.”

As a longtime member of the Green party, who stood for parliament last year, Bartos is duty bound to lead a sustainable lifestyle. But as everybody from David Cameron to the glossy magazine Vanity Fair rebrand themselves friends of the earth, he is far from unusual. Time was when the environment was for wimps. These days, alpha male George Clooney drives an electric car.

What Scotland lacks in energy-conscious film stars it makes up for in environmentally aware pensioners. Dora Elliott, 74, has decided to spend a large part of her life savings on solar panels. But while Vanity Fair nods approvingly at the ones on Julia Roberts’s roof, Elliott’s neighbours are shaking their heads.

“I have had comments about house values. People think it’s ugly and not in keeping, but clearly what concerns me is different to what concerns them,” observes Elliott.

“The panel cost £8,000 to install and I know it won’t pay back that investment — at least not while I am alive. But the environment is important to me. We all have to get used to using less energy, otherwise who knows what the world will be like in the future. I have a grandchild and it makes me think what sort of life she’ll have when she is my age.”

With our woeful weather, a solar panel is unlikely to generate more than a quarter of her household’s electricity. But with the executive aiming to have 18% of our energy from renewables by 2010, rising to 40% by 2020, panels may soon become commonplace; if councils allow them.

Julian Leiper, an Edinburgh accountant, has applied to his for permission to install £15,000- worth of solar panels on his roof, but has been turned down because he lives in the capital’s New Town, part of the World Heritage Site.

“The roof is M-shaped and you can’t see the inside of the ‘M’ from the street,” he explains. “We thought it was an ideal place to put some solar panels, which are the same colour as the tiles. The council disagrees.”

Lorn Macneal, the architect guiding the Leipers’ application, says it is essential the planners give them the go-ahead.

“Victorian and Georgian housing is extremely popular to live in, but expensive and wasteful to heat,” she said. “It’s essential for us to improve their environmental efficiency, but it seems people would rather worry about conserving buildings than the planet.”

The Glasgow University classics lecturer Ian Ruffell, 34, has yet to invest in a wormery, but he and Chloe Stewart, 31, have drawn up a list of green lifestyle measures: recycling, composting and subscribing to a box scheme for fruit, vegetables and milk. Neither drive, preferring to walk or take public transport. Despite the enticements of easyJet and Ryanair, they refuse to fly within the UK and, although they have flown to Europe twice in the past five years, they’ve decided not to do it again.

“Recently that’s meant holidays in Britain, but this year we hope to get to France,” says Ruffell. “It takes more time and the cost is higher — so it feels like you are fining yourself for caring about carbon emissions.”

Their home, a compact southside tenement flat, is as green as they can make it. The light bulbs are low energy, the windows have been refitted to reduce draughts and their electricity comes from renewable sources.

Taken in isolation these measures sound like a drop in the ocean. Switching off the video at the plug each night might save £11 a year, turning the central heating down by 1C could shave £30 off the annual bill. “But if everyone did these things, the impact on carbon emissions would be significant,” argues Ruffell.

“I think not having a car is what most people are shocked by, but most of the public transport in Glasgow is all right. The suburban train system is very good; the tube is good as far as it goes, though it should stay open later on a Sunday.”

As he scoops some more peelings into the wormery, Bartos observes: “People don’t usually think of cities as naturally ‘green’ places to live, but the fact is we can’t all retreat to the countryside and grow our own vegetables. Cities can be sustainable. It just takes a bit of thought.”

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