Garbage in

Let's face it, we're a mucky lot but after years of training, WasteServ has finally got some of us pretty well trained. To the enlightened these days, white means paper; blue means plastic; black means metal, and brown means glass.

But, alas, this is not good enough for our government, which, in its infinite wisdom, has recently proposed an alternative scheme for waste separation. If the bickering about financing ever dies down, this will offer a new, simplified way of carving up the world of rubbish: In one bag, a healthy mixture of tin, plastic and paper, and in the other, everything else.

I'm all for consumer choice, but even in the Switzerland of the Mediterranean, the presence of two incompatible schemes for rubbish separation seems like overkill.