I recycle plastic boxes, newspaper, cardboard and normal paper which is supported by my local council. As far as I know they stay separated until they get to the waste facility - after that who knows? I compost everything compostable. Every week, apart from the recycling, my and my son produce one (small) 30 litre bag of waste between us.

None of this is particularly difficult.

The problem is that we like not knowing where our waste goes because there's such a lot and we don't want to deal with it.

For example, where does the poo and wee go from our toilets? To a sewage farm. What happens then? Pass.

Do we want to deal with our poo and wee? Hell no. Back before the Haber-Bosch process, one of the end products was ammonium nitrate - saltpetre - which was the original treasure in the dunghill. And it was valuable because it was a main ingredient of gunpowder, as well as fertiliser and mordant for dyes.

Not any more.