That is when a panel of 12 judges gather to decide which are worthy of making the final shortlist.

Those who are chosen can then look forward to several weeks of being paraded like gala queens through record shops and the media in the run-up to the award ceremony at the Glasgow Barrowlands on June 20.

Scottish Water Horizons (SWH), the agency's commercial arm, recently took the decision to stop competing with private green waste businesses for multi-million-pound recycling contracts by closing operations at Linwood and Deerdykes at Cumbernauld, affecting 40 to 50 jobs. The Cumbernauld site had received a £300,000 grant from the Scottish Government agency Zero Waste Scotland.