PRIME Minister Tony Blair and Chancellor Gordon Brown have endorsed going green , even taxing us on it, but recycling in Ely and the surrounding area is selective and leaves much to be desired. We are issued with one black plastic bin to be used for pape

PRIME Minister Tony Blair and Chancellor Gordon Brown have endorsed 'going green', even taxing us on it, but recycling in Ely and the surrounding area is selective and leaves much to be desired.

We are issued with one black plastic bin to be used for paper only, and paper sacks for cardboard, shredded paper or garden waste; and please never mix paper and cardboard together or it will be left at the roadside.

Don't put glass bottles or cans into supermarket plastic bags for they, too, will remain at the roadside, yet no bin is supplied for us to put these things into.

Then we get the 'wandering bin' game played by the collectors. We get dropped a dirty bin and clean it, duly fill it with newspapers and put it out. Sure enough when you pick up the dropped bin you find once again you have been dropped a dirty bin, and your clean bin wanders down the road. Why is this? After all, it's just a matter of lifting the full bin, empty contents and dropping bin back to ground, hardly rocket science.

Recently I put out a bicycle wheel, of course silly me, it was the wrong kind of metal so it was left behind, as was a metal mop handle and TV aerial.

The latest refusal was two plastic buckets of broken greenhouse glass, a beer glass and a wine bottle. So we had to load the car and drive to the local recycling depot in Grunty Fen, driving past several black plastic bags of fly tipped rubbish on route. On arrival, I asked where they wanted me to put the glass, and was told "general household".

This turned out to be a large container with every kind of rubbish in it; was this to be sorted later or just used in land-fill, the easy option?

Some villagers within the Ely area get various coloured bins for different items. Why not all? After all, the MP's of all the major parties are shouting for us to slim our bins but we are not allowed to do so.

Phoning the staff running the office is a regular occurrence, requesting bags not left, bins not emptied or disappearing bins. Surely the most inept person can see four sacks filled and left for collection equals four new sacks left for the household, one bin left out equals the same bin left for the house.

One final point, when the operators drop a can or newspaper on the ground, pick it up. You are littering the countryside, town or village and not collecting the items left out encourages fly tipping, as is evident in Grunty Fen.

DON DREW

Wentworth