Household Waste Recycling Centres are being revamped across West Cheshire to make them more efficient and to start earning revenue for the cash-strapped council.

A leaflet outlining the changes, which start from April, has been delivered to all households.

Following consultation with residents there will be new opening hours introduced to ensure sites are open when they are most needed while operating as cost effectively as possible.

Northwich, Neston, Frodsham and Tattenhall will be open five days a week and Chester, Ellesmere Port and Winsford will be open seven days a week. All sites will be open at weekends.

There will be a new centre for Chester as the current site is one of the smallest but also one of the busiest. This will mean that from winter 2017, the facility will be expanded and enhanced to ensure it is better suited to the catchment area it serves.

A pilot ‘pay as you throw’ facility providing a competitive, low cost solution for small businesses with small volumes of waste will be introduced and if successful, similar facilities may be rolled out to other sites.

To counter potential fly tipping, a new monitoring system will be introduced in addition to work with enforcement staff, so that it will be easier to identify and prosecute offenders.

Re-use shops will be introduced at Winsford, Chester and Ellesmere Port which will sell items including bric-a-brac, small electricals and some furniture (all safety tested). These will increase the amount of waste re-used. The new Chester site will open their reuse shop when the site opens in winter 2017.

All sites will have new signage, layout changes and improved road markings making them easier, safer and faster to use.

Graham Pink, director of commissioning places and commercial management at Cheshire West and Chester Council, said: “Faced with difficult choices resulting from the need to make savings, the council’s ‘Let’s Talk’ consultation last year highlighted a desire from residents to make further savings from the waste management service to help protect other service areas from cuts.

“After considering a number of options, we chose to reduce the opening days and hours of some sites so that we are able to keep all of our existing sites open and enabling us to invest in the new Chester facility. This will allow us to achieve significant savings whilst still maintaining the number of sites across the borough to ensure that people are not disadvantaged through the closure of local facilities.”

A new reasonable usage scheme will replace the current waste permit scheme. This is designed to ensure HWRCs are only used by residents, who fund them.

Automatic number plate recognition technology will monitor vehicles entering every site. Frequent users, and those suspected of attempting to deposit non-household waste, will be required to confirm where the waste has come from.

Residents wishing to use the Neston site will still require a resident’s permit. The existing permits will be replaced with a new design.

Visit cheshirewestandchester.gov.uk or telephone the customer contact centre on 0300 123 7042 to obtain a new permit after April 1.