You sort out all your rubbish, separate plastic bottles from tin cans, wood from metal, throw it into the right skips, then the council throws it back altogether and it goes into the landfill.

For many, this is the reality of credit crunch Britain and its recycling policy. The U.K. has been slow to adopt the idea of recycling and unlike many of its mainland European counterparts, it has been dragged screaming into the new age of sustainability.

But the harsh truth is that when the world economies were booming, scrap had a very real value. With China gobbling up raw materials like they were going out of fashion, we were playing the recycle game with great gusto. There were many companies out there looking to buy-up waste plastic, metal, paper and textiles. There was enough money in the system to ensure that all this rubbish could be turned back into something useful and profitable.

Now, many of these same companies are struggling to survive and if these recyclable materials are not being sent to the landfill, then they are being stored in warehouses and on acres of hard-standing, unwanted and unloved.

And here’s the rub. The U.K. didn’t take to recycling very well. Sorting out our dirty rubbish, placing it in different wheelie bins, remembering when those bins are collected and being told off when you got it wrong, was very un-British. We Island race people don’t like being told by council officials what to do with our waste. And when the landfills reach overflowing point, we look the other way, determined that someone else will sort out the problem.

And now that council’s are struggling to cope with what to do with the recycled materials, you can almost hear the muttered told-you-so’s. It was always going to end in tears. But we have to resist. Recycling is vitally important to the welfare of the world and if we lose the ground we have fought hard to win, then the problem will only get worse. We have to recycle, full stop.

We must not let the credit crunch become the excuse to ruin what has taken years to achieve.