Achtung!

Trash Nazis. Not just the name of a rock band anymore:

Households face fines of up to £500 for failing to recycle food scraps in Government plans to introduce a slop bucket into every home.

One on four councils already collect food waste separately in order to reduce the amount of biodegradable rubbish being dumped in landfill.

However under radical new plans backed by Hilary Benn, the Environment Secretary, every council would have to bring in the controversial new system.

In an effort to force every household to separate food scraps properly and put them in the right bin, councils would be able to introduce fines of between £80 and £500.

The plan was first suggested by Mr Benn earlier this summer. He said it was ridiculous to keep on dumping biodegradable waste like food, which could be burned for energy or processed for biofuel, in landfill – especially when the UK faces massive fines from the EU for continuing to dump so much rubbish.

He suggested a ban on dumping food in landfill that would force every council to introduce separate collections and dispose of the waste through incinerators, composting or anaerobic digestion.

Now Defra is officially consulting on the plan to bring in a landfill ban on food waste following research from other countries that showed how successfully it can cut the amount of rubbish going into holes in the ground.

This will mean councils will have to invest heavily both in providing households with the new brown “slop buckets”, introducing new weekly collections and building the equipment to deal with the waste.

It is up to councils how to bring in the new system, but many will choose to threaten households with fines if they fail to comply.

Councils generally issue a warning before imposing on-the-spot fines of between £80 and £110 for failure to put out bins on time, overfilling wheelie bins or putting the wrong rubbish in each container.

And under new council rules, every adult at an address, rather than just the head of a household, could be fined, meaning a family of five or group of students living together could end up paying more than £500 in total.

In pilots separate food waste collections proved popular with most households but there were concerns about odour from keeping food waste in the kitchen and fears that some households will end up with up to five bins because of the need to separate other materials for recycling.

Just think of the Brownshirts tooling about in their trash-detector vans, nicking non-slop-bucket-compliant householders. Rather makes you wonder why Churchill bothered.