Monnmouthshire County Council has approved policy changes to the grey bags and nappy/hygiene collection frequencies across the county in a cabinet meeting last week.

The council will no longer be providing grey bags for household residual waste, which originally cost £80,000 a year to provide, and instead residents will be required to supply their own bags but still only be restricted to two per fortnightly collection.

In addition to this, the collection of yellow bags for nappy/hygiene waste, will from weekly to fortnightly and will be collected with householder residual waste.

However despite concerns that supplying the yellow bags was also a waste of money as they are no longer recycled, it was deemed necessary that the yellow/black bags remain.

Rachel Jowitt, the council's waste strategy and resources manager said at the moment the yellow bags help to identify the homes where more waste is allowed to be left and if there comes a time in the near future that this waste will be recycled again there would be no further changes needed to the bags.

Concerns to this second change were raised by Councillor Dimitri Batrouni who said that some families may have trouble getting yellow bags to the waste centres which will still accept them, and feared that waste from yellow bags could be left standing around for longer than necessary.

Councillor Bryan Jones, Cabinet Member for County Operations countered these concerns and said that while this may be a change for some, it was a necessary change as part of the budget restraints and to make the service more streamlined.

The official start day to this change is set as start date will be July 1, but the council has said that it appreciates that it will be an 'evolution' as existing supplies of grey bags are exhausted by householders.