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Weee Rule
As of next month, Britain must recycle all electrical waste, including TVs, computers, lights and toys, under the European Union's 'Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive', code-named, 'Weee'.
One of the UK's biggest recycling firms, Sims, is warning that Britain does not have enough facilities to handle the 1.2 million tons of Weee which is now expected this year.
And there will be more Weee next year.
Quite apart from recycling Weee, there is recycling plastic, newspapers and bottles. This is an everyday chore in the Western world is too often too complex: paper but not cardboard, plastic but not that plastic, and so on.
And there are suspicious minds. Many people suspect that lorry-loads of stuff collected for recycling end up in a landfill instead.
Research in California indicates that people are more inclined to recycle things if they do not have to sort them into different bins. Workers at a recycling facility on the outskirts of Paris, for example, have to sort through what households put in their recycling bin anyway, mostly because users do not know exactly what can and cannot be re-used.
San Francisco switched to what is called 'single-stream recycling' a few years ago and today boasts one of the highest recycling rates in America.
Recently, companies such as Wal-Mart, Toyota and Nike have adopted "zero-waste targets".
This may be unrealistic. Or maybe, it's a lot of old rubbish.
