BRISTOL City Council spent £45,000 hiring "waste doctors" to encourage more people to recycle but they appear to have had the opposite effect.

The "Recycling For All" pilot scheme was launched last September with two officers monitoring the rubbish produced by 3,275 homes in the city.

But rather than improve recycling rates the statistics show fewer people recycled their food, bottles and papers after the pilot than before.

Recycling For All was one of four projects the waste doctors were involved in.

If they found people were not recycling, the officers would send letters advising them how they could.

They also had the power to issue a £75 fixed penalty fine or begin court proceedings that could result in fines of up to £1,000 if people continued to refuse to recycle.

The idea was to drive Bristol's already impressive recycling rate of 39 per cent up – one of the highest in the country – even further.

The council had hoped a successful pilot could be expanded across the city, pushing the recycling rate up to 50 per cent.

But far from improving performance, results from the pilot show recycling rates dropped by an average of 10 per cent – and in some parts of the city by as much as 30 per cent. Recycling was monitored on three waste collection routes: Ashley and Horfield; Horfield and Lockleaze; and Shirehampton and Lawrence Weston.

Officers looked at participation levels in August, a month before the pilot started, and then again in January and February.

On average, the statistics showed that whereas 90 per cent of people were using black boxes to recycle their cans, bottles and paper before the pilot – only 81 per cent were doing so afterwards.

And the number of people using brown boxes to recycle their food waste fell even more sharply – from 73 per cent to 60 per cent.

The largest individual drop was in Shirehampton and Lawrence Weston, where the food waste recycling rate fell from 76 per cent to 46 per cent.

The only route that saw an improvement was Ashley/Horfield and by much smaller margins. Black box recycling increased from 92 per cent to 95 per cent and brown box use from 76 per cent to 78 per cent.

A report by the council's environment and leisure service director stated that using waste doctors was "very labour intensive, and costly".

As well as the 54 days spent monitoring the 3,275 homes in the pilot, the officers spent 24 days delivering advice leaflets to 12,138 homes on 11 waste collection rounds. The report questioned the accuracy of the data produced by the pilot. It stated: "Due to the recession and light weighting of packaging black box tonnage data may not indicate an accurate picture of increases in recycling activity.

"Anecdotal evidence from the waste doctors whilst monitoring is that previous non-participants are now participating, and more containers are presented for collection, which indicate a problem with the data collection."

The report was discussed at a meeting of the council's quality of life scrutiny commission yesterday.

Councillor Ron Stone (Labour, St George) asked, if there was a problem with this set of data, how can people know whether any other results are correct.

Project manager Sue Lutkenhouse described the figures as "an anomaly" which could only be explained by people putting out more of their recycling just after Christmas and not in the January/February period that was monitored.

Executive member for waste Gary Hopkins praised Bristol's performance on recycling and waste but also questioned how valid the results of the pilot were.

He said: "There are a whole raft of innovations, pilots and experiments. I wasn't impressed by the detailed design of this one. I don't think the figures are terribly reliable."

Mr Hopkins stressed that across the city recycling rates were so high that £2.8 million was being saved a year by avoiding sending waste to landfill.

He said: "We haven't become the most successful authority in the UK to continuously reduce the amount of waste generated by accident.

"It is because we've had the courage to introduce recycling innovations such as our successful communal bins scheme and extensions to our kerbside recycling services.

"Also the information gained from these various pilots is helping to bring down the cost of our multi-million-pound waste contract which will be decided within the next couple of months."

Mr Hopkins said that whoever takes on the new waste contract will be expected to provide information on recycling rates themselves.