Basildon and Southend councils are battling hard to hit strict new Government guidelines for recycling. With new experiments announced just last week, how do local authorities fare in their bids to hit the 25 per-cent recycling target? It always was an ambitious target - and now both Basildon and Southend Councils are stepping up their attempts to have a quarter of all waste recycled by 2000.

The decline in availability of landfill sites prompted the Government to set the targets, leaving councils all over the country battling for ideas of how best to improve their environment performance.

Realistically, it looks like a mass of councils nationwide are not going to make the grade, but certainly not for want of trying.

Basildon has already broken through the ten per cent barrier, but Southend is still stuck around the six per cent mark.

A recent survey of the contents of residents' rubbish bags, conducted in Basildon, showed that 64 per cent of the waste could be recycled.

But the big problem still remains - how do you get residents to take the time to recycle instead of just quickly dumping all their rubbish into one bag?

Basildon last week announced the launch of an experimental scheme - a separate collection of recyclable items, such as cans, glass, textiles and plastic.

And Southend is to set up its own doorstep recycling service in partnership with local waste contractors Cory Environmental.

The Basildon experiment is costing £20,000 and will be piloted in part of Wickford, with residents being given boxes and bags specifically for recyclables.

These will then be collected as part of the council's fortnightly newspaper collection.

That scheme was started two years ago and has proved a big hit, contributing to a trebling of Basildon's recycling in just three years. Barleylands Recycling Centre opened last year and a sale of environmentally-friendly home composting bins, which at the time was the biggest in the country, left 10,000 of the bins in homes around the district.

Meanwhile Southend is having a second crack at updating its doorstep service, which was scuppered 18 months ago when the bottom fell out of the world-wide paper market. November 2 is the day when the weekly rubbish collection will start picking up newspapers, magazines and cans.

Councillors hope that, if the scheme is a success, it will be extended to other recyclables such as bottles and cans. With all this going on, it is difficult to understand why it is such a struggle to hit the Government's 25 per cent target - or is it just plain unrealistic?

A Basildon Council spokesman said that, despite the Government's baying, funds were scarce.

He said the new trial will only go district-wide if private funding for it can be found.

He said: "The target is feasible and desirable.

"But there does need to be a lot more financial support from the government to make it truly possible.

"At the moment people have to make a conscious effort to drive to Barleylands or one of the recycling centres across the district to recycle goods

"So there's a need to make it as convenient as possible.

"It's an expensive operation and it's very difficult for an authority like ours to put in major investment at a time when we are working under a tight financial regime.

"If there was a national campaign that really caught the imagination and changed the public attitude that would help.

"There's a limit to the work a local authority can do."

Paper-chase - local authorities are racing to match government waste paper collection targets.

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