Have you read The Armchair Economist, by Steven Landsburg? The final chapter on recycling, religion and the First Amendment is marvelous.

I fall under the control of Belfast City Council.

My small back garden also has three bins in it. I have an extra bin in my kitchen for paper and plastic and a box for glass bottles. This clutters, even pollutes, my environment.

In sorting this material, I am being forced to do the same work as a bin-hoker scavenging a marginal existence at a dump.

If all this was worthwhile, then the rubbish I'm sorting out would be fetching the Council a tidy profit in re-selling raw materials.

I would expect a corresponding reduction in rates.

However, I suspect that the Council is selling the rubbish at a loss, because the raw materials are not worth anything. It is forced to make this loss because of European directives.

I suppose I should write to a councillor to find out whether my suspicions are correct, but it makes me feel like a crank, so I suppress the urge and every time I rinse out a baked bean can, I offer praise to Brussels.

Aaargh! The multitude of multi-coloured bins has just arrived on my street, too! Grey full-size wheelie bin for garden waste (I think I will fill this bin about once every 4 years), red for paper (but NOT the plastic "window" sections of envelopes! These must be cut out), green for bottles, cans and plastics.
Like in your area, they will now collect the "normal" bins once a fortnight, and the recycling bins on the alternate weeks.
The bins came with a leaflet explaining all the do's and dont's. And what they will do if you DARE get it wrong. Oh, this is just beyond belief, I'm going to have to scan this leaflet and copy it on my blog, because otherwise, you'll think I am making it up.

Unfortunately, no, I won't, because I have several such leaflets myself.

I'm going to get a compost bin and ask the council to take theirs away. I'm a keen gardener, so the only reason I've not had a compost bin up till now is to save space in a small garden. If I've got to have the bin anyway, I may as well make it my own and keep the compost, rather than give all the compostable materials to the council and then pay to buy compost.

Actually, not all the materials. For some bizarre reason, there's a whole load of things that any normal gardener would put in their compost but which aren't allowed in the green bins, such as eggshells and vegetable peel. Go figure.

Tom, your blog post on this made me spit coffee on my monitor.

Why can't the various authorities come up with a standard way of doing things, btw? You can recycle Yellow Pages, but I can't (and as my wife works for them, we have *loads*).

And the colour codes are nonsense too. Here we have black for general refuse, green for garden refuse, black again for cans and glass, blue for newspapers and plastic. Which means every week, my wife and I play a game we call "what the fuck", as in "what the fuck are we supposed to be putting out for the binmen this week?"

AAAAAnd, on the theme of WTF, What The Fuck do newspapers and plastic bottles have in common that means they go in the same recycle bin? Is it that the council saw plastic wood in B&Q once, and decided that's where plastic comes from? Why is it the council will refuse to take your newspapers away if they're contaminated with plastic windows from envelopes, but it's OK to mix the papers with GIANT SODDING PLASTIC BOTTLES?

WTF is my new motto, I think.

Incidentally, as someone who suffers from pretty major and ongoing back pain, this recycling lark is a nightmare. The paper, cans and bottles go in boxes, not bins, and while bins are available they have a fraction of the capacity of the boxes. So the council, ever mindful of looking after its residents, gave me a little trolley to wheel the boxes out on. Usefully, the handle was at the perfect height for a midget (I'm 6-foot) and the trolley only takes one box at a time, so I had to make three trips from the back garden to the street while bent over like Quasimodo. Then the trolley broke under the weight of a fortnight's newspapers, so I'm back to lumping heavy boxes about.

Hurrah for progress.