The people are trying to help combat global warming, but away from all the rhetoric just how helpful are the governments and local councils trying to be.

Our government like so many governments around the world has told us we must all tackle the problem of global warming, and one of the ways we the general public can help is by keeping waste down to a minimum and recycle everything we can. Living in England UK a country with far too many people on it, has its problems. Landfill sites are at a premium and getting very scarce, so recycle everything I thought, but it was not as easy as it seemed. The recycling agenda is up to each individual council, some provide different coloured boxes. Ours provides at great expense one blue plastic bag for papers and cans, for everything else you have to find a car park that stocks a recycling unit.

If you go to the local market most things bought there can be placed straight into your shopping bag or trolley. The local supermarkets are the worst culprits, does ever piece of fruit and vegetable have to go into a plastic bag I asked the girl at the checkout, apples, bananas, carrots and onions, all with skins on that you have to take off anyway, are first bagged in a white plastic bag then placed in a carrier that goes into my shopping trolley.    

 This Easter I looked at the Easter eggs on display, a large cardboard box with a small hollow egg inside. When will the government ask the manufactures to cut down on the waste that they are making? The cornflakes do not need to be placed in large cardboard boxes; a biodegradable bag would do just as well.

The other day I placed all my cardboard boxes into my shopping trolley and took them down to be recycled only to find nobody wanted them, a noticed stated: ‘plastics, paper and glass only but no cardboard please’. So back home I trudged with all my flattened cardboard boxes and jammed them in the dustbin. What a waste! I went around the house looking at all the things that arrived in a cardboard container. From milk to boxes of cheese in the kitchen, my new printer arrived in a cardboard box and so did all the printer ink. Countless things arrive everyday in peoples homes, all packaged in a cardboard that no one seems to want to recycle. I rang a company up and was told that it was not commercially viable to collect cardboard from people’s houses, only from large companies. So in other words forget all about helping the planet to survive, if a firm can’t make a fare size profit, it’s not interested; and I and everyone else has to keep putting their cardboard in their dustbin to be burnt to add to the CO2 or buried to help give of methane gas, now which does the council prefer.