CONTRACTORS have been sorting through Salisbury householders’ rubbish to check whether they are recycling enough.

But Wiltshire Council denies they were prying or invading people’s privacy.

It says they were simply carrying out surveys to assess what was being thrown away in general, and not examining what was in any single bin.

The former Salisbury District Council was among 87 authorities identified in a Daily Telegraph article as having secretly “snooped” through bins.

Conservative Party local government spokesman, Caroline Spelman, accused them of spying, and said a Tory government would outlaw the practice.

But Andy Conn, Wiltshire’s head of waste management, insisted: “We are not interested in what’s in individual people’s rubbish. That remains private.”

He said that, since 2005, he had worked with the district councils in Salisbury and west Wiltshire to organise eight surveys carried out by contractors. “In Wiltshire, we spend more than £25million a year collecting and managing waste,” he explained.

“We would like to do that on the basis of reasonably sound knowledge of what we are dealing with, rather than guesswork.

“We are having to make changes to services to meet government targets on recycling, and we need to understand what recyclable waste we are dealing with. It’s ‘market research’ really.”

Mr Conn said the survey team collected rubbish from 90 households in each district, from streets chosen to give a cross-section of the population.

They went out ahead of the usual bin crews on the normal collection days, and chose the bins at random. People were not warned, because they might have changed what they put in their bins.

“As soon as waste was emptied into the vehicle it was mixed with all the other waste in the sample, so it was anonymous”, he explained.

It was taken away for sorting by hand, and then weighing.

“In the last Salisbury survey, 14.6 per cent of the sample was paper, which was not making its way into the recycling collections,” he said. “We need to get that message across.

“Only four per cent was glass.

Food waste was the big one, at 22 per cent.

“All this gives us an overview of where to target information to get people to recycle more or minimise waste more.”

There are no more surveys planned in the foreseeable future, he added.

“But it’s really important for people to play by the rules, sort things properly, and put the right stuff in the recycling collections. Rubbish is a commodity, and if recycling loads are contaminated the buyers will reject them.”

For details of the surveys go to www.recycleforwiltshire.com and click on strategy, then on waste.