Forget the three R’s of reading, writing, and arithmetic – whoever came up with that one needs their head looking at - I prefer the ‘new’ three r’s of: reduce, reuse, and recycle.

Let me just say; I’ve been recycling for many years courtesy of education from my Grandfather. He was a big believer in reduce. If he could, he would reuse something. If he couldn’t reuse something, he would do his best to recycle it. He taught me well.

Locally we have a kerb pickup of recycling which is great, however I do miss hurling my glass bottles into the large recycling banks that used to appear on some supermarket car parks, and many a happy few minutes would be spent seeing just how hard I could hurl the bottle into the bank and hear it smash. Very cathartic and satisfying!

We had a ‘missive’ recently stating that we can no longer recycle our cardboard into the garden waste bin and that we must recycle it separately. No big deal, however, on any given bin day, we can leave out our rubbish bin/garden waste bin (alternate weeks), a crate for newspapers/magazines, a separate crate for glass/tins, a food waste bin, a plastic bag for plastic waste, a bag for clothes/fabrics, and soon, a separate bag for cardboard. On any given bin day we could leave out 7 different waste/recycle bins/crates and it’s out of hand in my opinion. Luckily I have a shed so I’m able to leave all this in the shed, there certainly isn’t room in my tiny kitchen! Many others leave as much of this outside their front doors, and it’s an eyesore particularly on bin day. It also blocks the pavements and some streets are a no go area until after the bin/recycle lorries have gone.

Some councils allow residents to put all recycling into one bin which is then sorted later. Why can’t they all do this? Our local council are complaining that only 52% of people are recycling regularly yet they continue to make it difficult. How long before we have to separate the glass from the metal? Or the newspapers from the magazines, and the scrap paper, and the envelopes? We could end up with over 10 separate containers!

They’re also going to take away our rubbish bins and replace them with a bin that’s half the size. It doesn’t bother me as there are only 2 in our household but what about larger households? How much is this exercise going to cost? Will they recycle the ‘old’ bins? I asked all this in a letter a few months ago when they were trialling the new bins but surprisingly I never got a response!

The more difficult they make it, the less people will recycle; the more the planet as a whole will suffer.