WHEELIE bins with microchips that can check how much rubbish you throw away or recycle may be rolled out across Worcester.

The city council is spending £1.3m on 70,000 ordinary wheelie bins, but is thinking about earmarking more cash for electronic versions.

Chips, which cost 90p, would be embedded in each home's bin and information about its weight would be gathered during collection rounds.

The council would then be able to tell if particular homes should be recycling more waste. The chips would also stop the bins being returned to the wrong address, prove whether rubbish was collected and show if homes need more bins.

Many people already think wheelie bins look like Daleks, the evil robots from TV's Doctor Who, and this latest development will only encourage comparisons.

Council tax across Worcestershire could rise if recycling rates do not improve and the county council, which is responsible for waste disposal, is forced to buy extra landfill space.

Coun Paul Denham, who chairs a committee into tackling the city's rubbish, said: "We've got officers going around homes now finding that people simply don't know what they can and can't recycle. At least this means they could target that advice."

He said people would not be fined if microchips showed people did not recycle enough, and denied this was a Big Brother attitude to waste collection.

The council's cabinet last night approved spending on £1.3m on wheelie bins without microchips, and is now looking at whether it can afford the hi-tech models.

About 100 councils in the UK use wheelie bins, with a small number - including Huntingdonshire council, near Cambridge - introducing the microchip system. But early this year microchipping met with opposition in Croydon, where residents said they didn't want to be spied on by their bins.

Every household in Worcester is now, instead of bags, to get two wheelie bins - a black one for rubbish and a green one for all recycling, including glass, which would be collected on alternate weeks. Flats will be given large communal bins.

Estimates put savings through the new collection methods, which will mean fewer crews and no spending in bin sacks, at £100,000 a year, but Mr Denham said he did not think there would be redundancies.