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This creates pressures on the environment and is costly as well: we must throw away less and recycle more to reverse this unsustainable trend.

Disposing waste was once straightforward. It would be collected on a weekly basis and taken for disposal, generally to a landfill site. The main objectives were to ensure that collections were timely and efficient, and that necessary disposal capacity was available. This is no longer adequate.

Westminster and the Welsh Assembly have set targets for recycling and composting household waste. By 2010, all local authorities will be obliged to follow the 2003 Household Waste Act.

Projections based on current trends show an urgent need to step up the pace. For example, one target requires 25% of waste to be recycled by 2005 but the Environmental Services Association, the trade body for the waste management industry, says by 2005 the actual rate will be just 14.1%.

Practical difficulties
To hit these stringent targets, councils can't afford to leave out any household. But collecting from flats and high-rise blocks is difficult: there is less storage space for materials, sometimes not enough for recycling boxes, and fire safety considerations also affect storage.

The most effective collection method – from the doorstep – is difficult to use in this context, and doorstep schemes therefore tend to be limited to street-level homes.

However, several councils are rising to the challenge of recycling waste from flats.

More than 80% of households in the east London borough of Tower Hamlets are in blocks of flats. To give itself a chance to meet the new environmental standards, the council has pioneered a series of innovative and ambitious recycling solutions.

Doorstep collections in high-rise blocks are to be ramped up to reach 70,000 households through a community company set up for the task, the Tower Hamlets Community Recycling Consortium.

Recycling good practice calls for collecting the widest range of materials possible. The Tower Hamlets scheme will collect a wide variety of materials, including glass, cans, newspapers, cardboard, plastics, food waste, textiles, shoes, telephone directories and eventually fridges and freezers, furniture, computers and other electronic goods.

To begin with, the consortium is concentrating only on smaller waste and is using innovative methods to make it feasible to collect from high-rise flats.

Residents will be given recycling boxes and asked to leave them outside their doors on an appointed day. This will be sorted on the doorstep into seven bags on a special trolley that can fit into a lift. The bags are small so that even when full they remain within the weight range specified for manual handling.

The trolley carries a sufficient supply of bags for a day's collection. Once collection on a floor is complete, the frame holding the separate bags on the trolley is folded and all filled bags can be loaded and brought down in the lift. Materials are then transferred to a caged electric vehicle and taken to a bulking point on the estate.

The use of local firms keeps the money spent on recycling in the community and boosts local employment levels. The consortium expects to have 35 staff and an annual turnover of £1.2m by 2004.

A more technology-intensive solution is available, based on installing flaps at the bottom of existing rubbish chutes, which divert waste into one of several bins.

The flaps are controlled from panels installed by the chute door on each floor. Residents pre-sort their waste, then press "paper" and throw in paper; press "glass" and throw in glass, and so on. The cost of installing the chute in a building of more than 200 residents is about £35,000.

Ground force
Other councils are improving ground-level collection facilities. Brighton & Hove council looked into a system of containers for different materials to be placed underground, with street-level chute openings for depositing different materials. This is a system favoured in Holland and it takes up less space at street level.

However, after a detailed survey the idea was dropped: the need to divert underground utilities and buy or rent special collection vehicles drove costs too high. The council is now looking at improved standard containers.