Benjamin Franklin famously observed that there are only two certainties in life, death and taxes. But there are in fact three certainties: death, taxes and bins. Of the three, bins occupy more of my thought life than my eventual demise, financial or otherwise. For a long time, bins used to be bins: receptacles for rubbish. You scraped the remains of your supper into them, tore a letter up and tossed it in (usually a bill) or emptied the vast tangle of dog hair and unidentified dirt of the hoover bag into it and remembered to heave it out on the right day for collection. End of story.
Not anymore. Since my local Oxfordshire council went Liberal Democrat in the recent election, it has been decreed that there are eleven categories of waste: general waste, dry mixed recycling, food waste, paper and card, garden waste, glass, plastics, batteries, waste electrics, textiles and coffee pods. All must be sorted – and dried, don’t forget – before being placed into an appropriate receptacle for collection. In terms of classification this sounds, on the face of it, relatively easy. Nespresso pods are simple, unmistakably themselves. Likewise, paper and card, no cause for classificatory ambivalence there. It’s when you get into the murky under categories of waste that the problems really mount up. Where, for example, would you put a lamb bone? Under the strict classification of food waste, bones are an outlier, neither food waste to be mulched (for manure?) nor general waste for landfill.
Such taxonomies go round and round in my head, all before coffee. Occasionally, an argument will break out with my co-rubbish custodian, otherwise known as my husband, in which we dispute the nature of certain ‘waste’ items. Usually, these arguments end with one of us putting our hand forcibly into the bin to retrieve the said piece of plastic as confirmation of its one-way ticket to a Malaysian landfill. There are, of course, many items that you simply can’t recycle let alone categorise. If you have children, this number will double exponentially with every passing day of the school holidays: a broken talking Ninja bought in a charity shop that may or may not contain a battery, but we don’t have the screwdriver to clarify; a piece of the bathroom tap that has fallen off, clearly not waste electrics but a possible contender for yet another category.
Since 2019, the residents of Shanghai, China have been subject to similar injunctions. In a nationwide drive to increase the country’s recycling rate – hoped to rise to 35 per cent by 2025 – the poor beleaguered dwellers of Shanghai were given strict waste classification rules disseminated through posters, training sessions and even an app pushed by some 30,000 volunteers. Mayhem broke out with one woman throttling a volunteer and finding herself detained in custody as a result. I may not be there yet, but I do, in line with John O’Connell of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, find myself wondering what I pay my council tax for: council tax that has risen by an average of 5.1 per cent for the year 2024-2025. It’s not as if the separated rubbish is always collected on time: changes in collection routes have forced Cotswold councils to apologise to residents for ‘unacceptable delays’. In Wales, world number two for recycling waste, due to their many and varied bins, residents complain of not being able to walk along the pavement due to the bin cities that have accumulated outside their houses.
Increasingly, I find myself wondering if what is deemed as ‘top-down environmentalism’ really does the hard work of changing attitudes to recycling and sustainability in the first place. Mostly it just feels like an eco-dictatorship. When I polled some people (mainly women) for answers, overwhelmingly they said that they didn’t think recycling was worth it in the first place. If you’ve ever found yourself chucking a plastic bottle into the general waste bin because the other one needs emptying and you can’t be arsed, then this could be you, too. Councils may flex their environmental credentials by proliferating the bins but incentivising people to make better environmental ‘choices’ around their waste will take more than window dressing. Or bin filling. I feel certain that Benjamin Franklin himself would have jammed a piece of paper in the general waste bin if he thought no one was looking.
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