NEXT time you sit down on a bench, take a closer look - you could be sitting on your own rubbish.

That's the hope of an Accrington firm which was set up four years ago by a community group and is now on the way to becoming one of East Lancashire's most surprising success stories.

Prosperity was formed to recycle waste in the Clayton and Altham area to reduce the amount heading for Whinney Hill tip, and has grown to take in around 300 tonnes a year.

The firm is now tucked away in an industrial unit off Charter Street, Accrington, where they recycle wood and cardboard and act as a sales outlet for 'green' products from benches to bird tables which have been made out of other people's rubbish.

Schools and sports clubs, councils and parks across the county have all bought 'green' products from the firm, all made from recycled wood and plastic.

Projects manager Graham Chadwick said: "We thought if we could recycle a little that we could reduce landfill, and that's where it all started.

"All we were thinking about was collecting cardboard from the immediate area and selling it on as a way of stopping it going into Whinney Hill."

Today Prosperity is a not-for-profit company which costs about £200,000 a year to run, and along with its full-time staff, has 25 trainees, all with learning difficulties.

Staff make about 45 runs a week, collecting waste card and wood from firms across East Lancashire. These raw materials are then broken down, the card turned into animal bedding and sold on, and the wood turned into chippings and sold to coal firms or used to heat the workshop in the winter.

But where Prosperity hopes to make its biggest impact is through a recycled material it buys from a Merseyside-based firm and then turns into everything from street furniture to play equipment.

Mr Chadwick says his dream would be to invest in his own plastic processing unit. He said: "I would like to be able to collect the plastic from within the area and would produce our own products so people in East Lancashire would be sitting on their own rubbish.

"The council could buy the products and put them on the streets.

"That is recycling at its best."