A green waste recycling scheme is to be introduced throughout Craven district from January after the Council won a £250,000 grant from the Government.

About 10,000 homes will receive new brown bins in which they can dispose of all their garden refuse. It will be collected every two weeks by a special vehicle.

The rubbish will be delivered to a new recycling plant at Skibeden tip in Skipton, owned by the landfill management company Yorwaste, where it will be turned into compost.

The Council is also negotiating with a company in North Craven which wants to produce organic compost. It would prevent the need to transport green waste to Skipton.

The scheme will remove 1,800 tonnes of rubbish from 24,000 tonnes collected by Craven district council each year.

A Craven district council spokesman said Craven was one of 112 successful authorities out of 190 which had applied to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs for a grant to set up the project.

The bins would only take green waste and he stressed food products must not be put into the bins because they could contaminate the green waste.

"Bins containing such materials will not be emptied. The bin will be labelled with a contamination sticker and it will be the householder's responsibility to decontaminate the bin," he said.

Carl Lis, chairman of Craven's performance and resources committee, said: "This Government grant is great news for Craven because finding resources for things like this is always a problem.

"It means roughly about 1,500 tons of waste every year is going to recycling."

Steve Grieve, managing director of Yorwaste, said an area at Skibeden would be created where the waste could be composted.

"We have a shortage of soil which we need to restore the site and this can be mixed with soil for that purpose. Also it can be stock-piled and sold to gardeners as a soil conditioner."

He said Skibeden tip still had a life as a landfill site beyond 2015.