Moray Council officials will be on hand at the region’s main recycling centre next week to offer advice to the public on using the correct recycling bins.
The move will be made to mark national recycling week from Monday – and to help reduce the local authority’s annual £500,000 bill because people are failing to place items in the correct containers.
Moray Council is taxed £80 for every tonne of waste that has to be taken to the landfill site at Dalachy.
A spokesman for the recycling team at Moray Council explained: “The most common materials to be wrongly put in to the landfill skip are clothes and textiles.
“An audit found that just under 40st of these materials had been put in the household waste skip instead of the textile banks that are also on the site. Clothes of any condition can be placed into textile banks and any that are not good enough to be worn again are recycled into new products.
“If sent to landfill these materials break down and create high levels of greenhouse gases – so it is very important to make sure that none are put into the landfill skip.”
A recent survey into what people where putting into bins provided by the local authority showed that the bulk of household waste was being put into the wrong bins each week.