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The Waste Resources & Action Programme (Wrap) has denied that there are plans to cut household rubbish collections to just one a month.

Responding to a Sunday Telegraph article, which claimed Wrap director Phillip Ward had predicted that the first monthly collections could start "in the next three to five years", Wrap said there was "no foreseeable prospect" of a move to monthly refuse collections in the UK.

"Wrap does not and has not suggested that this possibility should be considered by anyone," the organisation said.

Wrap said its main concerns were to get "greater uniformity" in recycling services and to extend recycling collections to include food waste and mixed plastic recycling.

A Local Government Association spokeswoman said that around 150 of Britain's 397 local authorities collected recyclable waste and other household rubbish on alternate weeks.

"There are no plans to start collections on a monthly basis," she said.

Defra's provisional waste statistics for 2007/08, published in May, showed household recycling rates had increased by two percentage points to 33%, while the amount of rubbish sent to landfill fell by 5% to 16 million tonnes.

Estimates for October to December 2007 will be published in August 2008. Final figures will be released by National Statistics in November.