RECYCLING chiefs have come up with an innovative way of making the most of your hard plastics you chuck in the bin.

Lancashire County Council are in the early stages of trialling use of them in making kerbstones and potentially be used to make other street furniture.

They are working with a company to make a number of prototypes and have the plastic kerbs on a street in Preston and see if it works in the real world.

The plastic kerbs are made from recycled material and mixed with fibre and ash.

The project is the final year of the trial and council chiefs hope if successful it could be happening across the county.

William Maxwell, service manager at Lancashire County County said: "If we are going to invest in the equipment creating these kerb, then we have make sure they will last.

"So far the one in Ribbleton is standing up to it with no marks and it has not collapsed.

"We do not want to rush it as we would get more complaints if they break."

Cllr Charlie Edwards, is the lead member for health and adult services and is part of the Lancashire Waste Partnership strategy sub-group, believes that the kerbs are innovative ideas.

"We are not going to stop at Lancashire if these work well.

"We will be rolling them out to other areas across the country."

It was part of an event by Lancashire County County to talk about how waste chiefs were coming up with ideas of re-using items people throw out.

In the average year the council receives 22,000 tonnes of wood across the recycling centre network but in the past month clean wood has been used by HM Prison Wymott near Chorley to create wooden garden furniture, planters and hanging baskets for sale.

Also a pilot project working with Lancashire Active is trying to make use of bikes that are no longer wanted by owners.

During a tour of the Lancashire Renewables facility, John Watters, operational and maintenance manager talked about how slight changes by householders across the county could help their processes in getting better quality recycling.

"We are trying to get the message out for people to make little steps to their routine.

"For examples some of these plastic milk bottles are not pure batches because they have bottle tops of different colour still on them.

"If people can take them off and still put them in the same bin.

"We are passionate about recycling and it would be important that people understand what goes into our work."

They showed off the different processes of sorting through plastic, paper, cardboard, metals and glass.

Cllr Edwards believes that householders need to take action to improve recycling or it could have consequences for the future.

He said: "We have been told there will be no space in landfill by 2025 if we keep going at current rates.

"So I think we need to empower the people with the news that if they make simple steps of trying to recycle more then we will not be looking at some of the nice green spaces in Lancashire for to create more landfill.