IN THE olden days it was simple. You took your rubbish out to the dustbin - the traditional metal affair - lifted the lid, placed the items inside and waited for the bin lorry to arrive once a week. Easy.

That was before we were alerted to the damage mankind is doing to the planet and before we were all asked to do the right thing with our rubbish: sort it, clean it and recycle it.

Now when you empty a container you’ve got to give it some thought and ask yourself a series of questions: what sort of rubbish is it, what symbol does it have on it - often this is microscopic and moulded within the container so you can barely see it let alone identify it - and where do I put it?

You spend time washing and squashing it, and then it’s time to pop outside to the silo of differently coloured bins beside your house and stick it in the appropriate one. For flat dwellers, it’s even harder, finding space to accommodate said waste before taking it to a communal bin.

It’s confusing and time consuming but we do it - at least most of us do - because we want to help cut down the amount of waste going to landfill.

Now, after years of encouraging us to recycle, the government says we are putting too much in our bins. They are planning a crackdown on recycling waste - by getting people to cut down on what they bin.

Ministers want to limit the amount of 'wishcycling' which sees the recycling process contaminated by items which cannot be recycled. They will ask people to be more selective in what they send for recycling in a bid to reduce the amount of material which needs to be separated and sent to landfill.

This is patronising in the extreme. Few people have a gung-ho attitude to recycling. Most of us try our very best and don’t stick anything and everything in the boxes. The problem is we don’t know what is acceptable and what is not.

What is needed is easy-to-follow guidance. Most of us have none whatsoever. Where I live we used to have a leaflet issued every year stating what could and could not be recycled, but now we get nothing.

A look online tells me that my local authority accepts products with the symbols PET 1, HDPE 2 and PP 5, but as I mentioned previously, these are often difficult to see, and some products have a ‘recycle’ picture but no symbol.

We also need symbols to be clearer. Why can’t recycling information be colour coded like our food labelling traffic light system? Why is this so difficult?

Variations in recycling practices across the UK mean there can be no nationally recognised instructions, but all local authorities need to make their own rules clearer, maybe through stickers we can place on bins.

Until we know what we are doing, we will remain in the dark and will, by the laws of probability, place inappropriate items out for collection.

At least once a week my husband asks me: “Can this be recycled?” My neighbour too, regularly asks me: “In which bin do I put this?” Often, I have no idea.

The present system is shambolic to say the least. I don’t know why we even sort our rubbish as most of it appears to be tipped into one giant bin in the lorry anyway.

And why does so much go to landfill? I once went to a recycling facility and was told that even one wrong item can result in a whole batch being rejected for recycling. If that’s true then it needs addressing.

It’s a crazy system and will never work properly until someone takes it by the horns and irons out all the grey areas.

At present the government is just papering over some very large cracks.