The trial will run alongside the council's new weekly recycling service, which it is providing for all 58,000 of its households by the end of September.
The recycling scheme, which was first introduced last year, provides households with two 55 litre recycling boxes for a variety of materials. A green box is provided for metals, plastic, cans and glass and a blue box for paper, textiles and shoes.
From October, a cross-section of these 58,000 houses on the recycling scheme will have their weekly residual waste collections switched to fortnightly for six months. Leaflets outlining the scheme were sent to households in August.
If this “2x Recycling Pilot” is successful, the council could use the system for all households – excluding flats. The council said its introduction of the scheme follows successes with fortnightly collection schemes among other councils including Daventry, Wealdon and Lichfield.
Brian Mayne, coordinator of the awareness campaign Waste Awareness Wales, said: “Many people who already recycle will find this new scheme easy to adapt to. We need to ensure that everyone else follows their example.”
In addition, the council and its partner – community-based group Newport Wastesavers – will also be delivering orange wheeled bins to 3,000 households, for green waste to be collected fortnightly. A pilot scheme for communal banks to be placed at 25 flat areas in the city is also currently under discussion.
Plastics
To deal with plastic bottles on the weekly recycling scheme, Newport Wastesavers will suspend a bag from the back of their collection vehicles to empty the material into. A spokesman said this is because of the low payload achieved from plastic.
He explained: “We could get bigger vehicles, but this would make it difficult to get around some of our streets, so this seems like the most viable option.”
In 2003/04 over 8,500 tonnes of recyclables was collected from Newport as well as more than 6,000 tonnes of green waste. The current recycling rate for the city is 20% and the council is hoping to increase this to at least 25% for 2004/05.
“It is important that we stand up and be counted in the recycling effort to have any hope of meeting the Welsh Assembly Government's 40% target by 2010,” Mr Mayne said.
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