According to The Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) and reported in Insider, 91.7% of all of Scotland’s nearly 5 000 licences were assessed as excellent, good or broadly compliant in 2016.
This is a major improvement from only 72.5% in 2009.
The SEPA Chief Executive said:
‘Every day, SEPA works to protect and enhance Scotland’s environment helping communities and businesses thrive within the resources of our planet. As part of that we’re clear, environmental compliance is non-negotiable. Every Scottish business will comply with the law, and we’ll work to ensure as many as possible will go even further.’
https://www.insider.co.uk/news/scots-business-environmental-compliance-sepa-12031690
If the trend was in the other direction it would be an SNPBad story so…
Talking-up Scotland 
BBC Scotland website: “Major sites rated ‘poor’ on environment protection”.
Again, if ‘major’ sites are failing to meet the appropriate standards, this is in the public interest. The report includes, in its second section, the positive factors you have identified. In the final section it has comments from spokespersons from some of the ‘major sites’ – and, they are indeed, ‘major’ – which indicate, in some cases, that they are continuing to seek for improvements to meet the standards and, in another, claiming that the low rating was based on a single day’s figure, implying, but not providing data (i.e. the company) that this single reading is an outlier.
Taken as a whole the website report is fairly balanced, but, the headline is attempting to ‘frame’ the perception.
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