Letter: ‘Manufacturers are every week producing packaging that increasingly does not fit into a single label.’

I was given chocolates the other week. They came in a cardboard box, with hard plastic trays, soft plastic film and expanded plastic cushions – very nice chocs.

I wondered if I had to spend as much time separating the stuff into NFDC bins as eating them. Equally, my milk carton is now cardboard, lined with something that is obviously not cardboard. Should I spend the night trying to de-laminate the carton? A pre-prepared meal came in a thin wooden tray. Clearly recyclable – but where? Cardboard, or garden waste perhaps? And does my almost empty paint tin go in with the baked bean tin?

NFDC wants to force households to use six bins (food, garden, paper, glass, plastic + stuff, and landfill). And then there are another six at the local tip – electrics, wood, etc.

It seems doomed to fail. Manufacturers are every week producing packaging that increasingly does not fit into a single label. Forcing the problem onto us, the customer, won’t work.

England is a very small, very densely populated country. Landfill is difficult, recycling shouldn’t be. English councils need to: a) combine budgets and recycling facilities into huge high tech robot/AI systems to analyse and sort; and b) combine to lean on suppliers to use packaging the robots can identify and sort.

But that would require joined-up thinking by our authorities. Better start separating that choc box, then.

Peter Padfield

Holmsley