The world financial crisis had forced the price of recyclable material down to an all-time low.

Speaking at a cabinet meeting, head of environmental services Andy Skelton said recyclable material was no longer attracting the high prices it was at the beginning of the year.

He said: "If at worst this drops, Yorwaste will stop selling materials and stockpile them in the hope it will recover next year."

Principal environmental health officer Steve Reynolds told members that Seamer Carr had storage capacity at the site for around a year's worth of the borough's recyclable rubbish.

He said it was unlikely they would have to store recyclable materials for much longer than that, but if that was the case, they would look to store it elsewhere in the borough.

The council has urged residents to continue sorting their recyclable material from non-recyclable, as normal.

Cllr Andrew Backhouse, Scarborough Council's portfolio holder for technical services, environment, projects management and coastal and flood defences, said: "We are fortunate that our partnership with Yorwaste affords us some security, but I am pleased that, in any event, Yorwaste has the long-term capacity to store collected materials, which should not only get us through the current depression in the recycling markets, but should enable a reasonable price to be obtained for those materials."

It has been just over a year since the council introduced its new recycling scheme throughout the whole borough.

Household paper, bottles and tins were initially carried on an 80-mile round trip to York to be sorted for recycling because Scarborough's new Seamer Carr plant was not in complete working order.

Now, all the borough's recyclable rubbish is collected and sorted at the multi-million pound plant at Seamer Carr. It is bailed and sent out to various parts of the world for recycling.

At the cabinet meeting, Mr Skelton suggested members consider the implementation of more mini-glass recycling sites around the borough in the hope it would encourage more residents to glass recycle.

According to Mr Skelton, glass and paper were still pulling in the majority of the profit made from selling recyclables. He said it was anticipated that providing additional glass recycling facilities could be funded from the receipt of government credits rather than from the income from glass sales, which were unpredictable in the present market conditions,.

He also mentioned that it was deemed unviable to introduce glass recycling into the kerbside waste collection scheme.

In his report Mr Skelton states: "The recycling rate at the end of 2007/08 was 27.5 per cent.

"The current recycling rate is approximately 44 per cent but this figure is potentially misleading as the collection of garden waste for composting in the summer months significantly elevates this figure. It is predicted that the recycling rate in 2008/09 will be in the order of 35-37 per cent."