The initiative, previously known as R3, categorises waste into five main product types, with one size of waste cage and one price per waste cage collected, in order to simplify the process of collection.

It claims to reduce costs attributed to landfill and collection charges, as well as promoting environmental management.

Any size customer can join, and as few as one waste cage can be collected by the merchant's appointed waste partners. The cages are then sent for recycling at a UK facility.

Each individual waste cage will have a collection and recycling charge of £65 plus VAT. Robert Horne said this represents a saving of around 25% based on current landfill and collection charges.

Steve Lister, Robert Horne's business development director, said the UK recycling industry is designed for large volumes of segregated waste where recycling companies collect from a single location.

"This creates a serious logistical and financial issue as the cost of collections and waste reprocessing outweighed the value of the waste for smaller volume producers."

The world's waste markets suffered a huge decline in the last quarter of 2008, with prices crashing to an all-time low when China closed its doors to UK waste, Lister said.

"In the long term, we will see a return to better pricing levels. However, Robert Horne simply cannot continue to build a future waste and recycling strategy around the Chinese consumption and needed to look back to the UK for recycling solutions."