Michael Reeves was fined £200 by magistrates

Magistrates fined Swansea journalist Michael Reeves £200 after finding him guilty of putting paper in a recycling sack for bottles and cans.

The 28-year-old denied putting an item of junk mail in the bag.

Julian Rosser, from Friends of the Earth (FoE), said: "I think what we need to do in recycling at the moment is to encourage people to recycle."

He added: "Local authorities need to be putting in good schemes and publicising them well to people so that more and more people are recycling.

We don't want to create the idea that recycling is difficult - recycling is not difficult Environmentalist Howie Watkins

"It seems very much that prosecuting somebody for what appears to be a little slip is not going to help that and is going to put people off recycling and that's bad news."

Environmentalist Howie Watkins said he sympathised with Mr Reeves and Swansea Council, but warned that local authorities should not make recycling appear too complex.

He said: "[The authorities] have developed an infrastructure to allow us to recycle and as part of that there's an element of responsibility on everybody to separate their waste, so it gets recycled in the proper manner.

"But I suppose the other side of the coin in all of this is that we don't want to create the idea that recycling is difficult - recycling is not difficult, it's quite a simple process."

Strict rules

Mr Reeves, a sports writer with the city's Evening Post, was served with a warning notice in April this year when he put his bins out a day early because he was going on holiday.

Then in June a green recycling bag was found outside his ground floor flat in the Mount Pleasant area of the city containing both paper and bottles and cans.

The court heard on Tuesday that the letter, which was addressed to him, "contaminated" the other items put out for recycling.