UK households will be rewarded with high street vouchers for recycling their waste under new Conservative plans.

Under the new Tory proposals families would be rewarded with high street vouchers for shops like M&S or Tesco of up to £130 a year for using their recycle bins. It’s estimated that the rewards could help to raise recycling rates in the UK up to 30% which would mean less rubbish would be ending up at landfill.

The recycling scheme would cover materials including paper, plastic, cardboard, metal and glass. Householders would be issued with blue roadside bins and the contents scanned as they are collected by rubbish trucks. Points would be allocated to each household and loaded onto a database so rewards could be claimed.

The new scheme has been tried out successfully in Tory run councils in the Home Counties. Instead of punishing people like labour currently do with bin taxes the Conservatives want to encourage people to recycle by offering rewards.