This is a time of year when Bradford, like the rest of Britain, is jangling with the sound of empty bottles being dropped into recycling bins. We consume, as a nation, millions of bottles-worth of wine and spirits, beer and soft drinks over the Christmas and New Year period. And after years of being exhorted not to throw them in our dustbins but to take them for recycling instead, many people have now got the message.

It is ironic, then, that just as we are acquiring an enthusiasm for recycling, the bottom has dropped out of the used-glass market. The owner of a Bradford company which stopped collecting glass at Christmas says that the British market for it has collapsed. There is apparently a particular glut of green glass, much of it imported in the shape of wine and beer bottles, for which there is a limited demand among British recyclers.

The danger now is that the newly-green British consumers will continue to take their empties to the sites of bottle banks for a while and just dump them there, creating a proliferation of dangerous "glass mountains", or they will become disenchanted and revert to throwing them into their dustbins.

Councillor Thomson, chairman of Bradford's waste management sub-committee, suggests a tax on non-recycled packaging. That might help, but only in a modest way given that the problem is one caused by market forces. If Britain finds itself with a surplus of the wrong sort of glass because of imports of wine and spirits largely from the rest of Europe, then finding uses for that glass surely is something which should concern Europe as a whole.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.