Thank goodness for…

… the letters pages of the local press.

A correspondent from Abingdon, who finds himself bemused by which bin is collected when these days, has devised the perfect system by which to remember, and has kindly passed on his plan to readers of the Oxford Times.

Get a small container and in it put one card for each collection for a fortnight. In our area that means two green cards, two ordinary cards and one brown card. Write on the top of each card the type of collection, the day for collection (and the evening before to put it out in case the collection comes early). Then put each card in order, one on top of the other, and when the waste bin for the top card has been dealt with, put that card at the bottom of the pile. This leaves the next collection, with its appropriate day, signalled clearly on the top.

We leave the cards in their container on a shelf by the kitchen door. It's a very simple idea, but for me it works.

Obviously the basic idea has many modifications; the cards could be put on rings and just flicked over; the cards could contain any relevant details of the type of waste that is, and is not, appropriate for that particular collection; the container could even hold details of Bank Holiday changes etc.

Now why didn’t I think of that?

The letter is headlined, 'Recycling cracked'. I think we can all guess what the sub-editor was implying.