Published: Thursday, 25th June, 2009 7:45am

New bin collections to be tested in villages

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NEW bin collections to try to avoid annual £10 million fines will be tested out in Culross, Torryburn, High and Low Valleyfield from September.

Stiff penalties await Fife Council – and probably council tax payers – if they can"t get residents to recycle more domestic waste and send less rubbish to landfill.

Currently around 40,000 tonnes of food is thrown away in Fife each year, which is the equivalent of 100 jumbo jets.

The four West Fife villages are part of the trials with residents set to receive visits and advice about the new collection regime.

For a six-month period they will receive a fortnightly collection of the brown bin, which will take food and garden waste, the blue bin, which will take paper, and the grey bin, for 'landfill waste' .

A new bin, for cans and plastics, will be collected every four weeks.

Councillor Alice McGarry, chair of the South West Fife area committee, said, 'We have to make our future decisions based on good evidence of what works and what doesn"t.

'I"m confident the people in South West Fife will help us in testing these options that ultimately will help us improve our recycling effort.'

Fife Council"s recycling and composting performance has improved markedly but they still landfill more than 140,000 tonnes of waste each year.

Under the Scottish Government"s Landfill Allowance Scheme, if they don"t reduce that figure they face fines of more than £3.75 million by 2015-16.

The penalty to councils is £150 for every tonne of waste that is landfilled above the limit set by the Government.

By next year, the target is that 40 per cent of municipal waste should be recycled, with that figure rising to 50 per cent by 2013 and 70 per cent by 2025.

The council has warned that they would also face increased landfill tax payments of over £6 million a year by 2015-16.

It also has an objective of sending zero municipal waste to landfill by 2020.

In addition, the European Landfill Directive demands that member states reduce by 75 per cent from 1996 levels the amount of biodegradable municipal waste that is sent to landfill.