Bristol's new waste supremo has pledged to improve the city's recycling rate.

Councillor Gary Hopkins is aiming to push the rate of all recycled household waste up to 50 per cent after it dropped from 37 per cent to 35 per cent over the last two years.

Councillor Hopkins became Bristol City Council's new cabinet member for the environment and community safety last week when the Liberal Democrats took control from Labour.

He plans to encourage more people to recycle organic waste such as food scraps and vegetable peelings by offering free corn starch bags to line brown recycling bins.

Councillor Hopkins said: "There has been a bit of a slippage in the recycling rate since we had a revolution with the system two or three years ago.

"The key to all this is the participation in the organic recycling, which has been pretty good but we need to take that on further because there was some bad publicity surrounding it in the beginning.

"We plan to supply corn starch bags to everyone who wants them because they make using the system very easy. There are about one third of the population of Bristol not using the system effectively.

"We'll knock on people's doors, give them the free bags and show them how to use the system. Experience elsewhere shows that actually works.

"We want to get 80 per cent of people using the system effectively and by doing that, we think we can get the recycling rate up to 50 per cent.

"We also want to expand the range of plastics that can be recycled and we are exploring the idea of rewarding people with a council tax rebate if they throw out less waste. This would be a voluntary scheme and would involve measuring the weight of the waste put out by those taking part."

Fortnightly bin collections and a weekly recycling system were introduced by the city council in 2006 and the recycling rate, which is the proportion of household waste recycled, rose from 12 per cent to 37 per cent.

It reached a high of 37.22 per cent in 2007 but has declined since and now stands at 34.66 per cent.

Councillor Hopkins' Liberal Democrat colleague Neil Harrison believes the city's drive to recycle more has been allowed to slip since 2007.

He said: "Bristol has the best recycling rate of any major city, nearly twice that of Manchester, but it has been allowed to drift aimlessly for the last two years.

"However, it doesn't compare as well when you look across the water and into Europe. There are rates well upwards of 50 per cent to look to in Germany and Scandinavia – this should be our aspiration, not just to be content around 35 per cent."

Under Labour, the city council claimed the recycling rate had dropped because of a change in the way it was measured.

A spokeswoman said: "There are a number of factors affecting the rate including the slight change in the way in which the council is required by the government to calculate the amount of recyclable material, which has affected the recycling rate by 1.5 per cent to two per cent.

"Further, residents appear to be more considered about what they are buying and as a result are generating less waste."