Jayne Doyle: Why is the policy on our rubbish in such a mess?

There are four of us in the house – two adults, two children, plus a dog and a cat. We eat, we read newspapers, we are all pretty tidy and we don’t like stuff hanging round. Like most families, however, we generate a lot of mess. We have a grey bin for general rubbish collected once a fortnight and we manage to go about four days before it is crammed to bursting.

That’s not to mention the green bin for garden waste and the brown bin for glass and cans and the frankly inadequate white bag for newspapers and the composter where all the vegetable peelings go.

Despite all these receptacles, there are still so many full bin bags outside our back door it resembles a Brazilian favela. We spend so much time going to the local “civic amenity site” when the flies and the smell get too much, I might as well have a part-time job there.

The other day I decided to take action. I managed to decipher the latest missive pushed through my letterbox by the council on the subject of “waste management”, and rang up to see if we could have a bigger grey bin.

Simple, you might think. Not so. The grumpy man on the other end of the phone informed me that only families of five or more qualify for a jumbo model. It’s the rules, you see. I could feel my ire rising. I could feel a rant about what I pay my council tax for building. I asked in desperation if dogs and cats counted? He sighed and said no. That’s why another baby looks like the only solution.

You might have thought that in the 21st century we would have found a civilised way to deal with the detritus we create. How hard can it really be to sort out rubbish? It seems to me those in charge are determined to make it as difficult and demanding as possible. I’m complaining, but at least I don’t live in Kent. My sister, who runs a similar household in Maidstone, is obliged to remove food waste from the general rubbish and keep it in a separate bin. It’s disgusting. It reminds me of the pig-swill silos we had at school. Apparently, her local council has decided it makes environmental sense. I’m sure that no-one voted in a councillor on an agenda that involved scraping plates at midnight, rubber gloves and putrid fumes, but there you go, that’s local democracy in action.

The problem is that local councils are given free rein to set their own agenda on refuse and recycling within something called the EU Waste Framework Directive, I think it is fair to say that this agenda is not always interpreted with the needs and wishes of local people at heart. It tends to be interpreted according to how politically correct the person in charge of recycling happens to be. That’s why the arrangements vary so much around the country. And that’s why, should you find yourself stuck where a group of strangers are brought together with not much in common, the subject of bins will always keep the conversation going.

How’s this for breaking news? From January next year, local councils might be given free rein under EU rules to inflict up to six bins on each household, each for different items. Consider for a moment the irony of this situation. We pay our council tax on the proviso that in return, we expect certain services. It’s not unreasonable to expect refuse collection to be covered under this heading. We all want to do our bit to help the environment and cut down on waste. Yet, increasingly, we are expected to do all the work.

Do you think the officials who come up with the rules have any idea how much brain space it takes remembering to put glass in here and plastic in here and all the rest? Do you think that in their strategy meetings they ever consider that it is simply daft and possibly dangerous to have rows of unsightly bins outside every door? This proposal is so ludicrous that even Veolia, the waste disposal company in charge of dealing with rubbish for up to a third of the British population, has said enough is enough. It’s calling for a policy of “no more unnecessary bins”. It says four are more than plenty for any home, and councils should leave it at that. Six bins in a row, but not one big enough to cope with a typical family’s refuse? If that’s official policy, no wonder our rubbish is in such a mess.