As council chiefs unveil their latest weapon in the war on waste, city council reporter Iain Robinson looks at how the new system will work and what kind of reception it will get

STOKE-ON-TRENT currently produces about 120,000 tonnes of household waste every year.

At the moment, less than 36,000 tonnes is recycled, but the city will have to increase this to at least 48,000 tonnes by 2010.

Failure to do so will see the city council fined £150 for every tonne below the 40 per cent target that it fails to recycle.

If the charges were brought in tomorrow, the city would be facing £1.8 million in fines and a large hole in its service budget.

Council managers argue that the figures are misleading, as the city actually sends about 30,000 tonnes of non-recyclable waste to the incinerator at Sideway, where it is burned to produce electricity.

But the Government does not allow councils to class incinerated waste as being recycled.

The solution is to expand the number of materials which are collected for recycling from people's doorsteps.

At present, residents have a brown wheelie bin for garden waste and a separate box for cans, paper and glass jars and bottles, plus a grey bin for all other waste, which goes for incineration or landfill.

But by providing a third bin, the city council will be able to add plastics, food scraps and cardboard to its recycling effort.

The system, which will be tested on 13,000 households in Meir Park and Bentilee from the end of January, is based on the highly successful strategy used by Staffordshire Moorlands District Council, which has already achieved a 60 per cent recycling rate.

The challenge for Stoke-on-Trent will be getting the newer, more complex system to work in areas which have never fully embraced the original scheme.

Portfolio holder for environment, Councillor Joy Garner, said this is why two separate areas have been chosen for the six-week trial.

She said: "The two areas were chosen because one [Meir Park] is the best in the city for recycling and the other [Bentilee] is one of the weaker areas.

"We need to see what problems arise in these two areas so that we can put them right before we go out all over the city."

The council's head of citywide services, Helen Bailey, said she is convinced the new system will work.

She said: "We have learned a lot from previous mistakes and we are moving away from a system that some other councils have introduced, with triplicate bins for homes that have no yards or storage space."

But Meir Park Residents' Association member Patricia Dixon, of Farman Close, said she thinks the new bins scheme will baffle many residents.

She said: "It does seem very confusing to me and I worry about people having the space to store all of these bins.

"I think we are pretty good at recycling in this area, but this will take people quite a while to get used to because it is so complicated.

"It also sounds to me like a way of introducing fortnightly collections via the back door, and I don't think people will be happy about waste such as disposable nappies lying around for up to two weeks."