Doing the bins has become an unbearable faff

Benjamin Franklin famously observed that there are only two certainties in life, death and taxes. But there are in fact three certainties: death, taxes and bins. Of the three, bins occupy more of my thought life than my eventual demise, financial or otherwise. For a long time, bins used to be bins: receptacles for rubbish. You scraped the remains of your supper into them, tore a letter up and tossed it in (usually a bill) or emptied the vast tangle of dog hair and unidentified dirt of the hoover bag into it and remembered to heave it out on the right day for collection. End of story.  

Not anymore. Since my local Oxfordshire council went Liberal Democrat in the recent election, it has been decreed that there are eleven categories of waste: general waste, dry mixed recycling, food waste, paper and card, garden waste, glass, plastics, batteries, waste electrics, textiles and coffee pods. All must be sorted – and dried, don’t forget – before being placed into an appropriate receptacle for collection. In terms of classification this sounds, on the face of it, relatively easy.