Newport City Council is taking the Welsh Assembly Government (WAG) to court next month over fears that a decision to revise landfill allowances could land it with thousands of pounds worth of fines.

The landfill allowance scheme (LAS) was introduced in Wales in 2004 to curb biodegradable waste sent to landfill. Allowances for each 22 Welsh local authorities were calculated using data from 2001/02 as a baseline. However, WAG launched a consultation in 2005 over plans to revise the LAS allocation from 2010/11 onwards following concerns that some councils had used a different interpretation of ‘municipal waste' to calculate their waste arisings. Newport was issued 30,707 tonnes of allowances for 2009/10 under the original scheme but the revision would mean it can only send 25,752 tonnes of biodegradable waste to landfill in 2010/11.

According to letsrecycle.com this represents a larger decrease in allowances than in previous years. Allowances for Newport had steadily decreased by either 3,265 tonnes or 3,266 tonnes a year since the introduction of the scheme but the revision sees this figure fall by 4,980 tonnes for 2010/11. In a bid to block the revisions, the City Council applied for a judicial review of the WAG's proposals, claiming that it was being "penalised" and that it had geared its recycling and reduction efforts towards the initially calculated figures. The judicial review will be heard in Cardiff on November 18 and is expected to last two days.

Newport is part of Prosiect Gwyrdd. Prosiect Gwyrdd (Project Green) is a partnership between Caerphilly County Borough Council, Cardiff City Council, Monmouthshire County Council, Newport City Council and Vale of Glamorgan Council. The project is looking for a regional solution to residual waste - the waste left over after recycling and composting has been maximised in each area. Local authorities have always relied on landfill to deal with waste but research shows that once recycling and composting targets are met, managing residual waste through landfill alone generates the highest carbon impact.