I am lucky enough to live in a fairly sizable semi in West London but my house is now almost completely given over to recycling.
About six months ago, the London borough in which I reside had a complete rush of blood to the head.
They delivered several (seven I think) containers of different sizes and shapes: there's a big blue bag for paper, a big green basket thing for garden waste, a large white sack for plastics, two different sized bins-with-lids for food and the traditional green box for the rest. Oh, and black sacks for "normal weekly collection".
Well it's all very laudable in intent I must say, but have we all gone completely mad?
Every Wednesday morning, four or five refuse trucks of one sort or another get wedged behind each other in my suburban street as they compete to pick up their own particular sort of rubbish.
The plastics collection is fortnightly (and alternates with the garden waste collection) which, alongside the slippage which occurs in a bank holiday week, means you have to have a Prince 2 diploma in project management just to remember what to put out on what day.
Added to this is the suspicion that - as 'im indoors mutters darkly as he labours to arrange his recycling in the front yard each week - "it all goes to the same bloody place anyway" (a view I have also heard from rather better informed sources) and you do have to wonder sometimes.
This morning, 'im indoors, when viewing the simply enormous pile of plastic in our kitchen (admittedly there are five of us and some of us are children with a lot of other children for friends who are in and out a lot) announced that he was going to invest in a machine to compress the plastics, as you actually cannot get through the kitchen doorway for it.
So, now we have to find house room for some gimmicky machine alongside all the boxes and bags. And just to add to the general mix we also have not one but two vast composters in our (not very big) back garden (and I've never seen any resultant compost, just so's you know).
We are fiddling as Rome burns here. I still bear the scars of trying to get a waste-to-energy plant away for Park Royal, and I understand the incumbent problems, but all this faffing about with boxes and baskets is disempowered nonsense.
The government should seize this moment of market collapse and low land values to devise a grant funding regime to get waste-to-energy plants installed for all local authorities and then we wouldn't need to sort, and we wouldn't need four or five different collections, and we wouldn't need any provision for landfill.
They moved quick enough to bail out the car industry (I understand the rationale but I'm afraid it still seems perverse to me) so why not sort out our waste strategy right now.
Waste-to-energy technology is now completely clean, gives no emissions, takes everything and demands relatively few lorry movements each day. In addition the plants pay for themselves within three to four years and, btw, save the planet in the process.
What's not to like?
Jackie, you are presumably unfamiliar with the furore around the incinerator planned for the Cricklewood sidings area on the Brent/Barnet border. What has become clear is that the filtration technology simply is not there to prevent nano particulates from being emitted which contain PCBs, dioxins and a variety of other molecules which are seriously environmentally damaging. And what about the energy generated by burning plastic as opposed to the energy consumed in its production. Once you start comparing the energy generated across a range of waste items with the energy consumed in their production, you soon start seeing a very different perspective. Recycle, don't burn!