THE Forest 'green bag' garden waste recycling pilot scheme is such a success that people outside the experiment area are ringing the council in droves to ask if they can be included.

"It really is a huge success. We are regularly picking up 30 tonnes of waste," said council recycling officer Kim Carpenter.

Even in its present form the scheme, involving 10,000 households, was helping the Forest council to approach its government-set targets of recycling 22 per cent of waste in 2003-4 and 33 per cent in 2005-6.

The pilot project, which was concentrating on picking up from as wide a range of locations as possible – urban, semi-urban and rural – had not yet run its course but hopefully it would lead to the whole area being served in time.

It might also see 'green' wheely bins introduced for garden waste Forest-wide, as the present scheme means bags have to be manually emptied into refuse trucks before the waste is carted to Hempsted.

"It is being composted and used to restore the Hempsted tip from a landfill site by waste firm Cory," said Kim, who is also the Forest's environmental promotions officer.

In the future there might well be local transit green waste site and even local composting facilities – however there were stumbling blocks for kitchen waste because they might contain meat products and were also difficult to transport safely.