TONNES of leaves which are being swept up from Bristol's streets are being bagged up and sent to landfill.

The revelation will be an acute embarrassment to the city council which is committed to a policy of producing "zero waste" within three years and urges residents to compost their green waste, including garden leaves.

The fallen leaves are being collected by crews of binmen in large, clear plastic bags which are non bio-degradable and are therefore likely to take hundreds of years to decompose.

The revelation came to light after an Evening Post reader spoke to a binman who was collecting leaves in St Andrew's Park. The reader said: "He told me that the bags are not bio-degradable and you would have a job cutting them with a Stanley knife."

After speaking to another binman in Westbury-on-Trym, the reader was so angry he followed one of the trucks to a waste transfer station at Avonmouth where he saw about 15 truckloads of leaves tied up in plastic bags, waiting to be sent to landfill.

He said: "I am livid to know that we are charged for recycling to be done and they are letting this new contractor dump literally tonnes of plastic bags full of leaves, which we know will not rot down into landfill."

Mike Birkin, from Bristol Friends of the Earth, said the leaves were already separated and therefore the company and the council should be trying harder to deal with them in a more environmentally-friendly way.

He said: "We would expect the city council to do better. It will be a blot on their recycling record."

The city council announced a few weeks ago that it was switching its waste contract from Sita to Norwich-based May Gurney, partly because of the company's commitment to recycling.

Neal Willis, May Gurney's regional operations director, said: "Where possible leaves are collected in open sacks and are sent to composting at New Earth Solutions. We sometimes have difficulty with recycling leaves collected from the roads and streets as they may be contaminated by litter, cigarette ends and other general rubbish, therefore cannot go into the recycling process."

New Earth Solutions is a new waste treatment centre where household rubbish is sifted and recycled where possible, to reduce the amount of waste which is sent off to landfill.

When May Gurney took over Bristol's waste and recycling contract on November 1, the council said: "The contract will help us reach our three-year goal of sending zero untreated waste to landfill and boost its recycling rate, in addition to saving the council £2.5 million a year in costs. As part of the new service, by July 2012 all householders in Bristol will have mixed plastics and tetrapak collections on the kerbside, in addition to their current recycling collections, helping them to maximise their recycling and reduce their waste."

Mr Willis said that next year, the contractor would be introducing improvements to their recycling programme by implementing a "full leafing programme" to compost as many leaves as possible.

A council spokeswoman said: "This is an operational matter for our contractor, May Gurney, which we understand is now being resolved.

"It has been brought to our attention that some of the leaves collected from the streets have been taken into the general waste stream, the majority of which is now being treated by New Earth Solutions and from which compost equivalent is being recovered, and some waste goes to landfill.

"We understand from May Gurney that the leaves will in future be sent for composting. The majority of the leaves from our parks go to our allotment sites for composting.

"As part of our contract we have set strict targets for May Gurney to meet in terms of increasing Bristol's recycling rate and reducing the amount of waste sent to landfill.

"If they do not meet them they will bear the financial cost. However, we expect the targets will be met."

She confirmed that the plastic bags were non bio-degradable.

Last year, about 250 tonnes of leaves were collected in the city.

Cabinet councillor Gary Hopkins, who is in charge of the council's waste management department, said the amount of leaves involved was extremely small. He said: "The amount of actual stuff that is involved here is about one-sixth of one per cent of the amount of waste that we actually deal with. The stuff that didn't go into the recycling stream was landfilled but the majority of stuff that did get recycled gets taken to New Earth Solutions where it is turned into a composted material."

Mr Hopkins said May Gurney was responsible for the operational side of waste and recycling collections and therefore any costs incurred would have to be met by them, not council taxpayers.

But he admitted: "Some of the leaves from streets and roads didn't go down the route that we would have wanted it to. They should have done it differently in this case."

He said the strength of the new contract was in giving May Gurney targets to meet instead of tying them down to a huge raft of specifications.

Mr Hopkins said: "We have told them we want these results and if we don't get them, then it will cost them money."

In 2004/5, the city council had an overall recycling rate of just 12.8 per cent. In 2006, Bristol was one of the first cities in the country to introduce separate weekly food and garden waste collections and fortnightly collections of wheelie-bin rubbish.

The result was a major jump in recycling levels, to about 36 per cent.

In five years, about 100,000 tonnes of food and garden waste have been collected that would previously have been sent to landfill, saving about £10 million of council taxpayers' money. This year recycling rates are expected to reach nearly 45 per cent.