A DISSENTING RECYCLIST IN A RENEWABLE WORLD

“I DON'T RECYCLE”, I announced to a group of fellow smokers gathered outside a bar in Soho discussing personal carbon targets. Immediately I regretted my admission. No one admitted the same. Searching their faces hungrily for an ally, I found my friend Tom. His face showed guilty resignation. I then looked to Hugh who shares a house with Tom and, registering his disapproval, asked why the discrepant practice if they both use the same bin. It turned out that Hugh separates enthusiastically, but never actually empties the recycling box, so once a week Tom empties its contents into the black wheelie bin. As for the other disapproving faces, I know it’s bad and negligent and obtuse of me not to recycle, but if I’m not mistaken, their disapproval was tainted with the same envy they would have experienced had I been having sex with a student or taking drugs on a Wednesday; secretly, they would rather like to share my dangerous disregard for renewables.

I’m not sure I’ll ever be keen on separating my waste and for that I blame Germany. I spent a whole year in Frankfurt timing my trips to the underground rubbish lair to coincide with everyone else in the building being at work. There were no less than five different bins. The Germans loved it, but then they were all set up to separate at the initial disposal stage. Their bins had subdivisions, colour-coding and extremely efficient operators. For me, it would have been a question of fingering through carbonara steeped newspapers and hairy mango stones to separate it all in the dung dungeon, a low-ceilinged room at the back of an underground garage with fluorescent strip lights that flickered on to illuminate the beastly bins of establishmentarianism. Occasionally, I’d miss-time it and someone would be in there, neatly putting small bags of pre-prepared waste in their rightful places. The regularity and ritualisation of it, the acceptance of being on such close terms with one’s rubbish, revolted me slightly. We English were not brought up to examine the sins in our bins any more than we were to inspect our own bodily waste. It takes a full strength of mind to curl your hand around a steaming dog turd on Hampstead heath, and if no one’s looking, well, sometimes you don’t notice it. The sin-bin is not a term coined without reason. We’d sooner hide the 13 empty bottles from a ‘civilised’ dinner party in our bin than we would ask to borrow some space in the neighbour’s green recycling box.

It’s the same part of my upbringing that makes it physically impossible for me to describe the texture of my faeces. On the rare occasions that a description of such bodily waste has been required of me by a doctor, it took five minutes of puerile flippancy to muster an honest description. And even then I used culinary equivalents like walnuts in vegetable stock. But as we get older, just as we get better at describing the shade of an erroneously yellow turd, so we must improve at recycling. It’s unavoidable, it’s not cool to be an abstainer, and while it is terribly un-British (some of my friends won’t even get their bikini lines waxed, such is their fixation with privacy in the waste removal department) it seems we’re all going to have to get better at it.

Next time I take out my green box, its lid perched awry on a roof of unread Sunday papers that shelter a carefully constructed tower of empty wine bottles, I will do so with pride. In a silk dressing gown, perhaps, with a flash of thigh and a private grin that says, “I recycle AND have fun.”