RE-CYCLING household waste should be made easier in the future thanks to a major upgrading programme planned by Somerset County Council for its Household Waste Recycling Centres .
Over the next three years the council is set to spend over £4million in improving the current infrastructure of its 13 centres as well as designing and building new centres where required.
Members of the council's executive board, meeting on Monday, approved a capital bid for £4,385,000 from 2002 to 2005, of which £575,000 is required immediately to ensure that works are carried out prior to the start of new centre operation contracts next February.
Executive Board member with responsibility for waste, Cllr Tim Carroll, said the size of the investment reflected the importance the county placed on encouraging residents to re-cycle their waste and ensuring the right facilites were available to them.
"We have been set some stretching targets to meet our target of re-cycling and composting a minimum of 55 per cent by weight by March 2004, and this level of investment shows that we are really serious in getting this message over to the public," he said.
County waste services manager Paula Brooks said: "We need to improve the layout and access of existing sites to enable greater separation of incoming household waste for onward recycling and composting and to provide state-of-the-art recycling centres for bulky and excess household waste."
She added that there was currently a need for £50,000 worth of maintenance work at the present 13 sites.
Other plans included the possible relocation of the centre at Minehead.
The executive board was warned by corporate director for finance Chris Bilsland that the bid would commit about half of the county council's capital approvals anticipated for 2003/4 to 2004/5 and that there were bound to be implications for other schemes in the future.