So I wonder if I can recycle clingfilm....?

One controversial subject we've all had to deal with in recent years is recycling. Obviously, the more you recycle, the less waste there is choking up your local landfill site, so all the better for the environment. All was well back in the good old days where you took your cans, bottles and newspapers down to the local bottle bank on a Sunday afternoon. People who wanted to recycle could recycle; they knew what they could recycle and they knew that if they didn't recycle they weren't going to get their bins attacked with bright yellow warning stickers by an over-zealous local council employee.

Nowadays, things are quite a bit more complicated. It seems as if most local authorities, in the UK, at least, are having a keeping-up-with-the-Jones' style competition to see which of them can get their constituents to recycle the most waste in the shortest amount of time. This is all very well, but it seems to have lead to what must be the most over-complicated recycling system in the entire western hemisphere. For example, at my parent's house in Essex, they are blessed with three huge wheelie bins, one green, one brown and one black. The brown bin is for kitchen waste, i.e. potato peelings, manky leftovers, things that have been trying to create an ecosystem at the back of the fridge and have been evicted. The green bin is for recyclables. The local council helpfully distributed a list of things which can and can't be recycled when the bins were first introduced, and since then it hasn't changed much as the list of things which could be recycled was already fairly extensive. All other waste, i.e. that which isn't harbouring anthrax spores or can't be turned into a Bag For Life, goes in the black bin. The one glaring fault of this system is that, for some unknown reason, glass can't be recycled. So, the institution of the Sunday afternoon bottle bank trip is safe, for now.

Where I live, the system is completely different. We have a brown bin, a black bin and a blue box (yes, a box.). The brown bin is for cardboard and garden waste only. The council says that this is because the contents of this bin are composted (I'm sorry, but can't kitchen waste be composted too?). The black bin is for "household waste", in other words, stuff that isn't cardboard or garden waste and can't be put into the blue box. The blue box is for recycling.

I have issues with this blue box. First off, it's a box. It might be emptied weekly, but, in our flat at least, it still ends up overflowing. Secondly, the list of items that can be placed in it is a constantly changing magical mystery that the council only occasionally deigns to inform us of. If you were to present me with a milk bottle made from a slightly obscure type of plastic right now, I wouldn't know which bin to put it in. When the blue box first arrived on our doorstep, we were presented with a list of things which could be put in it. I was even slightly annoyed at this, because to be honest the list was fairly basic, limited to items such as newspapers, magazines, coke bottles, glass bottles, etc. Next to this was a list of things we would be able to recycle at some point in the future, e.g. "Coming soon to most areas! Recycle empty milk and juice cartons from August onwards!". Why only most areas? And rumour has it that there are 31 whole days in August, so any chance of narrowing that down slightly? And aren't milk and juice cartons made of cardboard anyway, so why can't we just put them in the brown bin?! Anyway, you get my point. Present me with a scrunched ball of used clingfilm at my parent's house, and I can tell you right now that it belongs in the black bin. Present me with such an obscure item of rubbish here, and I'll tell you it's probably best to phone the council and ask.

Recently, the council managed to annoy me even more by dropping a letter through our door informing us that they were going to start charging fines for offences such as having a black bin which is too full for the lid to close properly, the assumption being, of course, that said person who is committing such an offence is not recycling enough of their waste (because it couldn't possibly be that a family of five produces more unrecyclable waste than an elderly couple). However, if you have a contentedly filled, fully closed black bin and an overflowing blue box, like we do most weeks, the bin men have been told to ignore any extra bits of recycling which might appear next to a blue box, and, in fact, this is another practise which could incur the council's wrath in the form of a fine. So what's the solution? It seems to me that the council are implying we dispose of our annoying extra rubbish through fly-tipping. Either that, or put it in the shed, wait for the rats to invade and then give the council's pest control men something to do.

The point of this acidic rant is that two different areas of the country have two completely different systems for getting rid of rubbish. It's pretty clear which one is the most efficient; but shouldn't such systems be uniformly the same across the country? This would put an end to the eternal confusion of most of the populace when it comes to being green about your bin. Or maybe that's just too easy.

xx