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Funding has been won from the European Regional Development Fund for a minimum of two years but it is expected the scheme will become self-supporting.

Each participating household will be supplies with a plastic box with a capacity of around 47 litres to store cans, cardboard, glass, paper and textiles.

On collection day householders will leave the containers outside their homes to be collected by an electric vehicle small enough to travel on the pavement but big enough to collect around a ton of material.

The collection crew will sort the material from each box into bags and, when the machine has reached its capacity, the bags will be unloaded onto street corners.

A diesel wagon will then collect the bags and returns them to the recycling base while the electric vehicle continues on its round.

In the first two years the project will employ and train 18 people and the predicted collection from 20,000 households will amount to 3120 tons of waste recycled each year.

Communities will be consulted over the scheme to ensure high levels of participation and, in the long-term, it is hoped to expand to 40,000 households and provide other recycling services.

The project is a partnership involving Manchester City Council, Manchester Training and Enterprise Council, two community recycling businesses Emerge and Acra and Groundwork Manchester.