THE Citizen has used its media clout to help a couple discover where their recycled rubbish ends up after it's carted off by the city council's binmen.

It follows our front page report last week on the Hall family, of St Margaret's Close, Ingol, who asked the council to prove they were recycling everything they claimed to.

Mum-of-two Tracey said she witnessed binmen mixing her street's recycling rubbish with regular household waste, removing the lot in the same wagon.

But the council said that, due to a fault on the regular 'kerbsider' recycling vehicle, a replacement 'old fashioned' wagon was sent out -- the one that Tracey would have seen.

Not satisfied, Tracey challenged the council to show her how the rubbish was recycled.

This week The Citizen took Tracey to meet the council's recycling officer, Amy Troner, for a behind-the-scenes look at the authority's Deepdale rubbish depot.

And Amy was quick to tell readers that her department was doing everything it should: "I want to reassure them that we work extremely hard to sort and recycle everything they're putting in their boxes."

She said that in the last two years the transfer station in Argyll Road had recycled more than 26million glass bottles, 2,000 tonnes of paper, 470,000 cans and 7,000 tonnes of garden waste.

Amy said: "It's extremely important to the environment that we do this. People really don't have any reason to think otherwise. It's unfortunate that occasionally there are operational difficulties."

Tracey said: "It's put my mind at rest but it isn't just what they do at the depot, it's what's actually happening as they're going round. They cannot do everything all at once but at least I saw they are attempting to do something about it."