Observations on waste

When I saw the stickers I saw red. It wasn't that they were offensive: they said "please" and "thank you". It was that all the thanks I got for months of carefully sorting rubbish - an exercise in which the symptoms of mission creep include four recycling boxes, sundry carrier bags and a labelled envelope for dead batteries - was a complaint that I had not done what I had in fact spent hours doing.

Impelled by a surge of recycling rage, I strode out and told the binmen that they had given me back somebody else's box - in other words, they had the wrong house.

Predictably this exposed the fault line in the system. Householder says it isn't so; binmen, equally categorically, say it is. Our relationship isn't working, and it's not just on my doorstep: similar scenes are being played out around the country.

According to the GMB union, the increased pressure on householders to sort their rubbish is leading to tensions with collectors and even assaults on them. For Donna Challice, of Exeter, it led last Monday to an appearance in court on six charges of "incorrect use of recycle bins" - putting food in the container meant for paper and plastic. (She pleaded not guilty.)

The underlying problem is not simply that householders don't understand the minutiae of recycling requirements, it's that they have yet to recognise the new role assigned to them. In the past they were masters and the dustmen were servants, a relationship offset only by occasional strikes and the veiled annual threat behind the "Christmas box" collection.

Nowadays householders probably think of themselves as customers, but this isn't right either - if they were, binmen would be trained in customer service and would offer apologies for misunderstandings.

What they actually are is "partners" of the kind hailed in supermarkets by "partner announcements". As with the outsourcing of cleaning jobs to "partner" contractors, the aim is to reduce costs.

The difference is that instead of paying the subcontracted workers not very much, the collection contractors pay the householders - to whom the job of sorting waste for recycling is outsourced - nothing at all.

It's not just the principle of the thing. Recycling collections are the central thrust in government efforts to improve the efficiency of waste management, and the efficiency of such collections depends critically upon how well the materials are sorted at the beginning of the process.

But the efficiency of the initial sorting depends on little more than the remnants of a sense of civic obligation, guilty environmental conscience and a willingness to please. What other major enterprise would be established with so little to drive a key stage of its process? Facing up to our new roles, we're entitled to ask: "What's our motivation?"

Nobody seems to have an answer. It's not particularly difficult to find sticks; but carrots, such as a reward card scheme tested in Rotterdam between 2002 and 2004, still seem to be pie in the sky.

The basic requirement of exchange, that somebody who provides goods or services gets something in return, has yet to be met. If rubbish is now regarded as a resource and recycling as a market, then householders should be treated as traders. That's how you get respect.

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