Plastic goods

We were so incensed by the realisation that our new home town doesn't provide facilities for recycling plastic, that we actually sat down and wrote a letter of complaint. It's not something I'd normally do; I generally see no point, myself, having zero faith in inter-election accountability. Getting some kind of response wasn't the motivation, we just wanted to shout at someone.

I mean really... go to the bottle bank down at Tescos there & you get three flavour options (white, green and brown) for glass, but there's nowhere for plastic. When we rang up to find out where to take our burgeoning polyethelene collection, we were told there was no such facility. Surely this couldn't be the case. But it was true: the council website offered up such incredibly lame excuses we were spurred into action and a Mr Angry email was duly sent last Thursday. It was quite polite, really, as complaints go, just a bit of a why, oh why accompanied by links to learned articles and some basic facts and figures. Apart from completely trashing suggestions that plastics recycling is uneconomic, these stats inform us that it only takes 250 polyethylene pop bottles to make an adult's fleece coat. Whey, where there's muck there's brass, as they say down south.

Anyway, imagine our surprise etc when the Durham Advertiser appears via our letterbox not two days later with a prominent article on the merits of recycling, and exactly how, from 16th April next, the lovely council will be arriving to collect all our washed & squashed from the comfort of our very own kerbside. One feverish logging onto the council website later, and there it is – a shiny new page has appeared, complete with some answers to questions they claim are "frequently asked", despite... never mind, suffice to say, none of our why, oh whys were among them, confirming the likelihood that they were completely superfluous to the democratic process. And what's more, it seems they weren't collecting cardboard beforehand, either. I can almost hear the sighs of relief over at county hall, as they narrowly avoid another, entirely pointless tongue-lashing from the keyboard of yours truly.

It's not all good news, though. I nearly choked on my Fruit Wheats when our town was mentioned on the national news the other morning, in the completely unexpected context of personal debt levels. It seems Chester-le-Street has the highest, per capita, in the entire country, at an impulse buy over five grand. It got a by-line in a few of the national papers, but the best coverage was in the Echo, who point out that it's more likely the commuter-belters (who can afford it) than irresponsible Poor People (who should know better) tarnishing the good name of the town. Someone's quoted as blaming Young People (which might have some validity, to be fair) but I'd basically argue that the advent of doorstep collection facilities provides the perfect opportunity to ditch the plastic once and for all, and all for one.

And there's more. Hot off the press, the results of the British Cleaning Council 2007 Loo of the Year Awards last week awarded the facilities on nearby Foundry Lane the gold medal in the Loo Attendant Team (Individual) category. I had no idea we were living in such a hotbed of national pre-eminence. We should probably shut up in future and thank our lucky stars we're living on the right side of town.

BTW, the doggy bag was photographed in a particularly posh shop window in Venice, one of those ludicrously expensive places just off St Mark's Square which prey on passing tourists all a-swoon with the romance of it all, to the point where they completely take leave of their senses and max out their plastic on hand-made novelty shopping accessories. It just seemed appropriate, somehow.