Recycling in Rother - improvements, yes, but is this the best we can do?

When I was at University a number of years ago in London, one of the first big differences I noticed between my street and the street I'd grown up on in Crowhurst was the green and black bins outside every front door, for recycling.

For me, recycling had always been an extra chore, something designed to make the trip to the supermarket that much longer as we stopped to chuck that week's bottles and papers into the overflowing bins in the car park. Still worth doing, yes, but I struggle to believe that the majority of local residents, especially those without cars, would have the time or energy to do this week in, week out. So to see something as easy as this -three separate bins to ensure that we don't unnecessarily throw away everything for landfill when much of it could be recycled -came as a revelation to me.

Thankfully, Rother Council finally saw sense last year by bringing in its own recycling system. Quite why it took so long I don't know, but now that we have it, that's not the point. All our bins were replaced with three others - a green box for paper, a black one for plastic and cans, and a big black one for everything else. Simple? You'd have thought so. Buteven after receivingbooklets to explain what can and can't be included, manyof usare still confused.