I saw an article the other day about a council the U.K. installing radio frequency identification tags (RFID) onto their wheelie bins. These tags are installed to monitor the amount of rubbish that people throw away. When the bin is collected by thetruck every week the tag transmits who the bin belongs to, and the truck weighs the bin. This seems to be a quite reliable mechanism for monitoring how much rubbish each household throws away.
Of course there was a national out cry about this, with the usual stupid daily mail reading idiots using the words "big brother" because they can't think of anything else to say; have they even read 1984?. Some local residents in the council pilot scheme even removed the tags and sent them back to the council. The council now have to replace them at a cost of £600,000. Crazy!
So is it (as the daily mail puts it) putting a spy in the bin, an intrusion into privacy? No, just a mechanism to get people to start recycling by charging them for the rubbish that they generate every week. I'm all for a scheme like this, I say "make it nationwide". Anything that will make people recycle is fine by me and should be encouraged. If the government want to make it possible they need to make the removal of these tags illegal. I think the same people who complain about such a scheme are the same people who can't be bothered to sort out the recyclable materials from their rubbish every week. We can't afford to just throw everything away; we need to recycle everything we can before there is nowhere else to bury the waste. Land-fill sites are really struggling with the amount of rubbish they receive every day. Plus, not all the things we throw away are from sustainable resources, they will run out one day.
Our family tries to recycle everything it can. Glass, plastics, cardboard, paper, metal cans and tins can all be put into those recycling bins you see at almost every supermarket. If you can't get there yourself, you should be getting someone else to do it for you.