Recycling rubbish is old hat

All over the world, groups of people with qualifications in ologies the great mass of humanity didn't even know existed spend their lives discussing topics of great moment. Most of these discussions occur in locations that the rest of us have to save up to visit for the holiday of a lifetime. I believe the theme of the latest conference is the effects of carbon emissions on Global Warming. It is taking place in South East Asia and has attracted 3000 delegates from all over the globe flying in Business Class and staying in four and five star hotels. Since this is a politically important conference to be seen attending, most of the delegates, of course, are spending other people's money to attend it. But, hey, what's the point of being the world's leading authority on the effect of regular baked bean consumption on the atmosphere if you can't parly it into the odd trip to the South Seas?

Anyway, many of these self-declared experts will spend much of their navel fluff collecting time trying to work out new ways to get us to recycle just about everything and anything we can. This is entireley laudable snce we should spend the planet's resources with a little more care than a drunken sailor on a wekend pass. But, what gts my goat is the patronising, lecturing, hectoring attitude they adopt when laying down the law to the rest of us.

For anyone over the age of about fifty there is nothing remotely new about reccycling - except for the name of course.

When I was a street urchin growing up in Central London virtually everything I had to wear had already been worn by many other people before reaching me. We didn't know the clothes were recycled. They were simply hand-me-downs.

In an era of large families and meagre budgets, it was the only way that most mums could keep their kids clothed. Most children I went to primary school with wore clothes that had been broken in by several older siblings before they got to wear them

Waste of any kind was not merely frowned on but almost a criminal offence. Much of our regular pocket money came from collecting empty lemonade bottles and returning them to get back the deposit they carried. Sometimes, in our enthusiasm for recycling, this involved swiping a crate of bottles from the backyard of the off licence and then returning them in dribs and drabs to the front counter to get the deposits back

Rag and bone men were a regular feature of street life. When they came around with their horse drawn cart calling out " Old rags and lumber", the housewives would trade old bits of furniture, bundles of old bed clothes and the like for money or goods in kind. It wasn't that rare for over-enthusiatic kids - encouraged by the totter - to drag out their mum's best, and probably only, coat and swap it for a gold fish or a balloon. Two streets from where I grew up there was a totter's yard run by a man called Arthur Allen. There, we did a regular trade in bundles of old newspapers, rags, lead ( don't ask where we got that!) and other recyclables including bike frames and wheels. In fact, our regular visits to Highbury to watch Arsenal play on a Saturday afternoon were funded by our newspaper and rag collecting activities.

So, there is nothing remotely new about recycling. In poor countries around the world people still have to do it not out of any sense of moral duty but simply to stay alive. Unfortunately, none of them will ever be able to afford to fly half way around the world to tell a posse of climate change experts how to go about organising it.