DOOR-TO-DOOR or kerbside collection schemes are the future if more of our waste is going to be recycled. In the fourth of our special reports Chris Baker looks at how some areas are cutting what gets thrown away and the problems they face.

THE old are leading the way when it comes to getting us to do our bit and recycle more of our rubbish.

That is the verdict of Paddy Johnstone, who started the recycling co-op Magpie ten years ago. It now collects from 5,000 homes in Brighton and Hove.

He said: "Older people tend to be good recyclers and a suggestion has been made that a lot of those older people lived through the war when recycling was a huge industry.

"Certainly those older people have lived through a period when we have not been as affluent as we are now and have lived through periods when packaging was re-usable."

Otherwise women tend to be better recyclers than men and young men the worst of all - although it is mostly young men who apply for jobs at Magpie.

From small beginnings the community recycling co-op now employs 24 full-time and five part-time staff, operates seven vehicles, and this year expects to see its turnover reach £500,000.

It is recognised as one of the country's more innovative community recyclers and is exactly the kind of locally-based 'Green Collar' enterprise many see as the future for the waste economy.

For £16 a quarter Magpie collects aluminium and tin cans (Britons use enough drink cans each year to stretch to the moon and back), paper, cardboard, textiles, plastic bottles, tin foil, and glass.

Magpie currently has four conventional vehicles and three electric trucks - the latter put together in a workshop at its Saunders Park headquarters, off Lewes Road.

The depot is also full of furniture and household items that have been collected ready to be repaired, cleaned-up and sold on.

Mr Johnstone said: "There is no problem with getting rid of any material, where the problem exists is how much money you get for it."

The market is one of the keys to increasing recycling. If there was a guaranteed stream of material, so the theory goes, businesses would be quick to invest in reprocessing centres.

Like so much else it needs central Government to take the lead, Mr Johnstone believes, even in the little things like setting mandatory, rather than voluntary, recycling targets for local authorities.

It would be central Government or the EU too that would have to take the lead in reducing packaging and making manufactured products easier to recycle.

Mr Johnstone said: "Products should be designed with recycling or re-use in mind."

At the moment Magpie does not collect organic kitchen or garden waste and will not touch things like margarine tubs, which are made from two plastics that are impossible to separate.

Magpie's experience is that people will recycle if they are given the chance.

Mr Johnstone said: "When you implement recycling you are asking people to change their habits, and changing habits can take some time."

Collecting rubbish that can be recycled directly from people's homes is seen as the most efficient way of cutting down on what is thrown away and produces better results than relying on people to take their waste to recycling points.

Brighton might be home to the innovative Magpie co-op, but so far the council lags behind other authorities who have introduced their own door-to-door collection schemes.

It is something the authority says will change as part of its new household waste collection contract, which started this week, although it has yet to find any funding for a scheme.

Adur District Council recycles between 20 and 25 per cent of waste - more than double the amount achieved by its neighbouring unitary authority in Brighton and Hove.

Adur was one of the pioneering recycling councils and its door-to-door collection scheme reaches eight out of ten of its 56,000 residents, who put collection boxes out once a fortnight. A further ten to 15 per cent of people have recycling points within easy reach of their homes.

The main problem at the moment is finding a market for the material getting collected. Card is about to be dropped from collections of newspapers and magazines because there is a glut and reprocessors will not take it.

However, the scheme is still among the top ten in the country in terms of the amount being recycled.

Seventy miles along the coast one of Brighton's bete noirs, Bournemouth, is experiencing similar success.

Bournemouth recycles about 37 per cent of its household waste at the moment and is drawing up plans for large scale composting of kitchen and garden rubbish, which it hopes will take that figure above 40 per cent and perhaps even to 50 per cent within the next two years. The man responsible for Bournemouth's waste strategy, Roy Osborough, said: "We have done the easy bit, that is to say the dry recyclables, now we are doing the not so easy bit, the putrescables, the compostable material."

Bournemouth also has a material recycling facility, similar to the four East Sussex and Brighton and Hove want to build, and sorts waste at its civic amenity sites - the two accounting for the bulk of its 37 per cent.

Mr Osborough is optimistic about his council's chances of reaching 50 per cent. He said: "We have got to be positive, we have got to take a view, a local decision if you like, and the only way our council can do that is by being bullish."

In the absence of landfill Bournemouth has no choice but to adopt wholesale incineration if recycling fails and it is something the resort's council wants to avoid.

Mr Osborough said: "The problem just goes up the chimneys and then it is somebody else's problem. We really should be looking at minimisation schemes and source separation schemes, before we even think about incineration."

Closer to home, Wealden District Council introduced a door-to-door scheme for paper, cans and foil four years ago. It currently reaches about a third of houses in the district, and this autumn door-to-door composting for organic kitchen and garden waste was added.

The council has been recycling between eight and nine per cent of the waste it collects, but in the 5,000 homes where composting has been added the figure has now risen to 55 per cent.

Although Brighton and Hove does not yet have a council-run collection there are still plenty of people making their own efforts to reduce their waste.

Sheila Schaffer, for example, hardly puts anything in the bin. Papers, bottles and cans all go for recycling and her kitchen waste is used for compost.

About the only thing in her bin on collection day is plastic.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.