Recycle-mania

Although I wouldn't describe myself as a keen fanatic about recycling (aka saving the planet), where it's easy and reasonably convenient I don't have any hesitation in doing my bit. We've had a special blue-lidded wheelie bin for some eighteen months or so now, and even with just waste paper, newspapers, cardboard, tins and bottles, it fills more quickly than the "ordinary" green bin does. We also get a scrap metal guy with a lorry (and a frightfully off-key musical horn sound!) round on a fairly regular basis.

A growing innovation in recent months is an absolute deluge of charity clothing collection bags left in the letterbox: the idea being to fill the bag with old clothing (and sometimes but not always books and bric-a-brac as well) which will, allegedly, be collected on a specified day later in the week. Except that I've never yet seen anyone actually doing the collections, resulting in any full bags left littered about the street. I'm skeptical too about how much of the money actually goes to the charity concerned, and how much of what's supposed to be resold actually gets siphoned off as the collector's profit, because judging by the number of bags we get left - sometimes two or three a week - it seems like big business. I've so many of these wretched bags accumulated at the moment in fact that to fill them all would take every single item of clothing that I own! So I'm just going to use them as bin liners, which will save me buying any, and the clothes I don't need I'm going to sell on eBay. After all, charity begins at home, as the old saying goes.