A regional daily gave a front page nod to a famous war film to mark an early success in the newspaper’s campaign to clean up its patch.

The Edinburgh Evening News launched its Bin Watch campaign after seeing a big increase in the number of complaints about rubbish piling up in the streets of the Scottish capital.

The EEN’s city council reporter Alistair Grant asked readers to use their mobile phones to take pictures when they saw uncollected rubbish and share them with us on Facebook and Twitter.

The campaign’s initial success made Friday’s front page, below, with Dirty Dozen star Lee Marvin being swapped for City of Edinburgh councillor Lesley Hinds.

Deputy editor Euan McGrory said: “The response has been overwhelming. Within days the council promised to take action. Part of their solution is to create a dedicated team of six environmental officers to go in and sort out some of the problems.

“That made us think of Lee Marvin and his crack team in the Dirty Dozen. You know, it’s a dirty job, but somebody has to do it.

“After carrying loads of grim pictures of rubbish in the streets, we thought it was a fun way to tackle a serious and sometimes unpalatable subject.

“We’ll be asking our readers to help us monitor how successful the council’s crack team really are. Edinburgh really is a beautiful city so our hope is that by working with our readers we can help to get it back to looking it’s best as soon as possible.”