Oh dear, it's national Recycle Now week.
With the subject rarely out of the news, it's the week when the majority of the population will grow sick at being told what they should and shouldn't be throwing away. We are in danger of reaching the stage where the preaching will become too much for some, and they will take to the streets en masse, throwing plastic bottles and rotting fruit around.
For me, however, all the airtime given over to recycling is reassuring. It is comforting to think that I am not the only person with a garage bursting at the seams with egg cartons, cereal boxes and empty lemonade bottles.
My friends sometimes call me Mr Trebus after the old bloke on BBC's Life of Grime, whose home was a health hazard because he refused to throw anything away.
I can't say we've reached the stage where we can't move because of plastic bags filled with refuse collected from the bins outside our local shops, but we are not far off.
I believe there's a use for everything. As a member of the organisation Freecycle - who give away and receive items free - told me, someone's rubbish is another person's prized possession.
My squirreled-away bits and pieces are always coming in handy, and friends know where to come if they need a bit of piping or a cardboard tube.
I'd like to recycle much more, but for the moment, here are the things we regularly reuse: l The inside of toilet rolls: My husband uses them for planting seedlings.
l Foil cat food containers: The children use them for paint, as does their school.
l Threadbare socks: Great for my annual assault on dust, and make good floor mops too.
l CDs: Again, used by my husband to keep birds off his crops.
and the things I'd love to recycle, perhaps at a future date: l My car: I need to change it, but can't bear to lose the parts. What if I'm invited onto Scrapheap Challenge or Robot Wars. Those bits would be vital.
l My wardrobe: Trinny and Suzannah would confine it to landfill, but I'm sure there are people out there who share my love of shapeless jumpers in sombre colours.
l My husband: I feel guilty including him, but after almost 25 years, isn't it only human to fancy a change? (I'm taking Zsa Zsa Gabor as my role model) The problem is, I can't see how it can be done other than by growing pampas grass in the garden to advertise myself as a swinger (the two go hand-in-hand, apparently). But I can't bear pampas grass, so perhaps I'll hang onto my husband for now.
The problem with recycling is that it gets in your blood. You can resist for so long, but once you start considering how you can reuse an item, the possibilities are endless.
Mr Trebus may have been a one-off, but I predict the surge of interest in recycling will lead to many clones. And people like us will have the last laugh. When the day comes that our bins are fitted with CCTV cameras beaming images straight back to Defra, and people are heavily fined for throwing more than a cup full of rubbish away, we will be sitting pretty among our piles of newspapers and aluminium cans.
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