What sort of an Oliver Twist world are we living in when people will post small children into recycling skips to steal clothes intended for families in the Third World?

Not a lot surprises me these days, but I have to admit that the reports of raids on clothing "banks" in the Kirklees district did raise an eyebrow. People are breaking the locks on these banks and stealing the better-quality garments. Or they're reaching into the orifice that people post their unwanted clothes into and hooking out what they can.

And, yes, they really are lowering young children into these big bins to rifle through the clothes and recover any good stuff.

Are these 1990s Fagins greedy, desperate or just plain stupid? How long before a child gets trapped or injured during one of these looting escapades? Or how long before Kirklees Council decides that it's no longer prepared to take the risk and abandons the scheme?

It would be understandable if it did. But it would mean a lot of clothing going to waste which now gets recycled to places where it's badly needed - places where the clothing thieves, however hard up they might think themselves to be, would be considered to be living lives of luxury.

Recycling banks for all manner of unwanted items - bottles, cans, paper, plastic, clothing, shoes - are a brilliant idea. Far, far better in so many ways to re-use it or make money out of it than to bury it in vast holes in the ground, at great expense.

But as with so many things, there are those who spoil it for everyone. Even some of those people with genuine recycling intentions don't seem to be able to get it right.

The area around the various containers on the Greengates car park at Sainsbury's last weekend, for example, was a terrible mess. There were dozens of bags and boxes filled with bottles and newspapers all over the place, as though people had just taken them there and dumped them rather than post them into the various banks.

Perhaps the containers had been full (although they no longer were). If that had been the case, surely the idea is that you either take your stuff back home with you and try again later, or drive off to somewhere else in search of a bit of space for it.

You don't just leave it lying around in boxes which disintegrate after the rain, leaving their contents to be blown or kicked around the place.

If these car-park recycling centres are doomed to be abused in these various ways, then the Council needs to speed up its plans to having us sort our rubbish at home into different bins, to be collected from our door.

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