Gordon Brown could use next month's pre-Budget statement to signal Labour's biggest hike in green taxes.

The chancellor is planning to double the tax on landfill rubbish for local authorities and open the door to waste charges targeted at consumers, the Guardian reported on Wednesday.

Treasury officials are divided on the extent to which landfill taxes should jump to encourage recycling by councils.

Hawkish Whitehall greens back a jump from £13 per tonne to £34 by April 2004, while doves support a £5 rise in 2004 with incremental £5 increases to £34 by 2007.

The newspaper suggests that extra taxes could help plug Brown's spending shortfall with tough environmental measures netting the exchequer an extra £1.2 billion.

The government is also expected to give the green light to a levy - of up to 10 pence - on plastic supermarket shopping bags.

The Environment Agency will welcome taxes on rubbish.

Agency chief, Baroness Young, believes the move would help combat "the throw away society".

"We are certainly very keen to see moves made to bring home to the public the real crisis facing waste disposal in this country," she told the BBC.

"We want to see moves to increase recycling to minimise the amount of rubbish we throw out. We have got to become less of a throw away society, so financial signals like this would be extremely important."

The quango and adviser to the government on green issues backs a doubling of the landfill tax.

"So much of our waste goes to landfill or is burnt. We can't continue in that way," said Lady Young.

"Certainly there has been discussion for a long time about the need to increase the landfill tax. It certainly goes up at a very slow rate.

"We want to see it double at least, because when we talk to the waste industry, they are very clear that the new technologies that they use elsewhere in Europe simply aren't economic here as long as landfill is very, very cheap."