Thousands of tonnes of household rubbish are to be trucked to other counties for recycling.

Hampshire waste chiefs are anxious to avoid a repeat of the scandal when paper, cans and plastic bottles voluntarily sorted by householders were dumped in landfill sites.

They say the new measures should enable them to cope with the growing mounds of recyclable rubbish until a new £10.5m plant is built in Alton by mid-2004.

But green campaigners have accused them of bad planning and letting people down. The county's only materials recycling facility (MRF) in Portsmouth sorts about 61,000 tonnes and is unable to cope with all the recyclable rubbish currently being collected.

And the problem is going to get worse, as Southampton City Council and Gosport Borough Council start kerbside collection schemes this year.

The plan is to truck 30,000 tonnes of dry recyclables to MRFs at London, Reading and Rainham in Essex. The figure is the equivalent of about 7,000 dustcarts loads.

Bill Jabelman, of Alton Friends of the Earth, said this week: "It is most regrettable. They should be slated for bad planning."

But he said it still made environmental sense, as the benefits of recycling the paper, cans and plastic would outweigh the costs of fuel for the extra dustcart journeys.

He added that there was also the psychological factor. "Once you have got people into the habit of recycling it is important not to let them down. But a more environmentally-friendly form of transport would be rail or sea."

Ron Newton, of New Forest Friends of the Earth, thought the plan was "deplorable".

He said: "It makes a nonsense of the whole green idea if rubbish is taken long distances by road. These huge lorries take up a lot of energy and create emissions."

The recycling initiative is run by Project Integra, a consortium of all the district and city councils plus Hampshire County Council and Hampshire Waste Services, the firm which gets rid of the waste.

It chief executive, Steve Read, said that £150,000 had been set aside to pay for the scheme. "We do acknowledge that there is an environmental cost in moving the waste around, but we have to look at what is the most acceptable option to the community.

"People have been saying to us that they expect the waste they have taken the trouble to separate to be recycled. In the short-term, there is a cost but it is only until the Alton facility is built."