The Royal borough of Windsor and Maidenhead has today (September 7) launched the second phase of its trial of the rewards-based recycling scheme RecycleBank, which will see residents rewarded for recycling commingled dry recyclable material.

The six-month pilot for 3,750 households in three areas of the Royal borough represents the first time the American scheme has been used in the UK to cover materials such as paper, cardboard, plastic, glass and metal.

Residents will be able to earn up to £130-a-year in rewards under the second phase of the RecycleBank scheme

RecycleBank sees residents awarded vouchers and discounts for national and local businesses based on the amount of material that they recycle at the kerbside. Under the dry recyclables aspect of Windsor and Maidenhead's scheme, residents will be able earn a maximum of £130 per year in vouchers and discounts.

Windsor and Maidenhead currently operates a twin-stream recycling system - separating glass and plastics from fibres - but households in the pilot areas of Ascot, Windsor and Maidenhead have been issued with a new 240 litre blue bin to allow all material to be collected commingled.

Speaking at an official launch event held today, councillor Liam Maxwell, cabinet member for sustainability at the council, said: "We have 45,000 tonnes of waste each year which goes to landfill and so it is in our interest to reduce the amount of Landfill Tax we pay. We have made recycling simpler and we have got one big blue bin so we can put all our recycling in there and the more recycling we put in there the more rewards we get.

"That also helps us get the recycling rate up and by rewarding people we show we don't believe in having police-like forces going around inspecting the bins we want people to be rewarded. We believe that the carrot is much more effective than the stick," he added.

Scheme

The council intends to roll-out the dry recyclable scheme to all its residents in December and said it now has 80 reward partners - including Marks and Spencer - as well as claiming that the initiative offers a help to local business during this "tough economic time".

Introduction of the six-month trial is not intended to disrupt existing waste collection rounds in the pilot areas and householders are not being charged to take part.

Material collected in the blue bins by the council's waste contractor Veolia Environmental Services is weighed using a weighing mechanism onboard collection vehicles and, using identification equipment fitted to the bin, the household is awarded points based on the amount of material recycled.

The commingled material collected is then sent to Veolia's materials recycling facility at Rainham in Essex to be sorted.

Ian Williams, regional director of Veolia, said: "Anything that rewards people for recycling and driving waste from landfill is obviously beneficial, so to be involved in this makes us extremely proud. From an operator's point-of-view the first roll out went really, really well and we are looking forward to rolling this out."

The first phase of the RecycleBank trial which was launched in the council area on June 1 has seen half of all eligible residents sign up to receive rewards based on the amount of green waste they recycled at the kerbside (see letsrecycle.com story).

The launch of this latest phase of the scheme comes just two weeks after Halton borough council in Cheshire announced it would also be running of a six-month trial of the American rewards-based system for dry recyclables from October this year (see letsrecycle.com story).