Northumberland is set to face significant challenges when the Government forces local authorities to provide a food recycling service, councillors have warned.
Northumberland County Council has been running a pilot scheme for 5,000 properties in four locations across the county since November, with a county-wide service required by law from April 2026.
But councillors say that any such service will be difficult to provide in Northumberland due to the county's sheer size as well as the rural nature of many communities.
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Speaking at a meeting of the council's communities and place overview and scrutiny committee, Coun Colin Horncastle - cabinet member with responsibility for waste and recycling - thanked officers for work on the pilot but stressed it would be a difficult feat to pull off.
He said: "I would like to say thank you to the officers who have been out there making this work. I have got some questions that need to be answered in the future.
"It does worry me - and this is nothing to do with this council, this council is doing what it has got to do as the Government has resolved we provide this service to every household, and we will do it. But, make no mistake, this is a massive undertaking for this council, massive.
"There is some Government funding, but after that it is down to the council. We have 3,500 miles of roads in the county and there is houses on all of those. Just think about the scale of it.
"If this is going to be carbon neutral? It is saving a very small amount of food waste; is that going to help us when we have got it all gathered up? That is something that this council needs to look at.
"Up to now the reason we're here today is to look at the results, but the way ahead - there's questions to be answered."
The food waste trial is currently active in the Longhirst, Hebron and Ulgham areas near Morpeth as well as the Stobhill area of the town, with collections also ongoing in Bedlington and Pegswood.
Members of the committee were told that of the households "actively participating" in the scheme, an average of 2.84kg of food was was collected. When the same calculation was applied across all homes in the scheme, this fell to 1.4kg.
In total, 136.36 tones of food waste was diverted from "residual waste" - the equivalent to 13 full rubbish trucks.
Liberal Democrat leader Coun Jeff Reid hit out at the Government for implementing the policy in the first place.
He said: "Regardless of what our residents actually want to do, they're going to be made to do it in April 2026. That is just me moaning about this terrible Government we have got.
"I think we're going to meet quite a bit of resistance."
Officers explained that residents would be offered the chance to participate in the scheme, but would not be forced to.
DEFRA said in 2020 that if all local authorities provided kerbside food waste collection, the amount of food waste collected would increase by 1.35m tonnes by 2029 - reducing greenhouse gas emissions by an estimated 1.25 million tonnes per year.
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