TENS of thousands of York homes could soon see their piles of plastic bottles picked up and recycled.

City of York Council environment chiefs are to consider proposals that could see plastic bottle collections extended to 60,000 homes in York.

Nine hundred homes in York currently have the bottles collected as part of their weekly kerbside recyclables collection, with the "average" home said to recycle eight kilograms of plastic a year.

This works out at about 7,200kg, or more than seven tons, of plastic recycled each year only from those 900 homes.

Late last month, fortnightly kerbside recycling collections were rolled out to about 60,000 York homes, from an initial 20,000, but the weekly plastic bottle collections are still made from only 900 homes.

Kristy Walton, City of York Council's head of waste strategy, said in a report: "According to Recycling of Used Plastics Limited (RECOUP), a registered charity established in 1989 to promote and facilitate post consumer plastic container recycling in the UK, when plastic bottles are collected on multi-material kerbside schemes, the collection rates of other materials increase by typically ten to 30 per cent."

Various options for plastic bottle recycling will be put before tomorrow's meeting, to be chaired by city council deputy leader and executive member for the environment Andrew Waller.

Other options as well as extending the collections to 60,000 homes are:

- Continue with weekly plastic collections from the 900 homes only

- Continue with the plastic collections from the 900 homes but make them fortnightly

- Transfer the 900 homes on to fortnightly collections and stop collecting plastic bottles, so an extra 1,075 homes could be added to the fortnightly collections

- Provide an improved network of plastic bottle recycling banks, as only two exist in York at the moment, both at the Foss Islands Road waste site.

The cost for extending bottle collections to 60,000 homes has been estimated at between £375,000 and £410,000 a year, with a possible one-off payment of £120,500 to provide and deliver extra kerbside collection boxes.

Providing two plastic bottle recycling banks at each household waste site, and one at each of the five main supermarket recycling sites, is expected to cost between £55,000 and £90,000 a year. Between £13,000 and £33,000 would be needed to pay for the banks.

Ms Walton said: "The amount of household rubbish produced is growing by three per cent each year.

"The city must move away from the disposal of waste, minimise the amount produced and maximise the amount of waste that is reused and recycled."

The proposals will be discussed at York Guildhall tomorrow.

Updated: 08:40 Tuesday, July 08, 2003