I foolishly believed that the biggest threat to the tranquillity of the Cotswolds came from Soho Farmhouse, financiers who drive the clean Discoveries and Jeremy Clarkson. That was before I learned that the region’s Liberal Democrat-controlled council mandates the highest number of different bins per household of any authority in England.
There are ten – yes, TEN – different recycling requirements, including separating batteries, textiles, electronic devices, coffee pods, and a summer pedal bin for all the glitter that comes with the local Wilderness Festival (I may have invented that last category, but it’s only a matter of time).
Chelmsford and Hounslow boroughs are joint second in the Olympic recycling table, with nine categories imposed on residents. I can barely cope with Cambridge’s green, blue and black bins and the bi-weekly rush to clear away the rickety piles of newspapers, bank statements and Amazon boxes that threaten to bury me.
Heaven knows what would happen if I had to research the disposal conditions for my micro-needling facial roller, which is made of titanium, plastic and traces of human epidermis.
Since when is it acceptable to leave the responsibility for efficient waste disposal to households? I can’t remember ever having signed a contract committing to examining every inch of plastic packaging in a desperate attempt to find the code for the plastic resin that indicates the level of difficulty (one to seven) of recycling.
A maneuver that also involves me getting my reading glasses out of the recycling bin for imitation tortoise shell. I also don’t know who decreed that book receipts and publishers’ catalogues are not allowed in the waste paper bin, even though they are, yes, made entirely of paper.
I foresee a future where we all become Brazilian slum scavengers, crawling over tiny piles of garbage like extras from Mad Max. I want to throw away my old Nokia from the 2000s, but I’m terrified of having to crack it open to extract trace elements like lithium, cobalt, graphite, aluminum and copper needed to build an army of street sweepers. I predict that in ten years we’ll be extracting ammonia and H2O from our own urine and making human guano.
The annoying thing is that recycling never needed a push in my household. My husband and I are both children of wartime parents with their zero-waste mentality. My mother hoarded old rubber bands, empty ice cream and margarine tubs, while old clothes were cut up into dusters and scrubbing rags.
Even now my husband has to snatch old, ratty cords out of my hands and say, “You can wait until hell freezes over, but that will never do any good.” We have a compost heap, make regular trips to the dump, and take old clothes and DVDs to our corner thrift store for distribution to specialty retailers. And we’ve thrown so much glass into the local glass bins that we deserve a medal for both recycling and renewable energy.
I like the virtuous feeling that reusing rubbish gives me. My halo glows brighter every time I take old egg cartons to people with chickens. But when a local council imposes restrictions, all that shiny, comforting righteousness (a vanishingly rare feeling for me) evaporates. Suddenly you’re living in fear of fines instead of feeling noble. I’m still recovering from a silly incident where our green bin went missing and we had to throw our rubbish into an empty bin bag, against the rules – only to find that the binmen had broken the bin when emptying it and taken it away without telling us.
We already live in an age of fear – why add to it by worrying about throwing AA scrap in the textile bin? George Orwell might have put it this way: three tons good, ten tons bad.
