DOES anyone know what kind of brain came up with the recycling policy in Crowborough?

We have two wheelie bins – one for food waste (brown bin) and the other for cardboard and garden waste, etc. (green bin).

In addition we have two other receptacles – one to take newspapers and another to take containers such as plastic milk bottles or fruit juice cartons.

Incidentally, the brown bin is black, the green bin is black, one receptacle is blue and the other... you guessed it, black.

The food waste bin is collected every two weeks, alternating with the garden waste bin and the other two containers, which are collected during the weeks in between. So outside our door we have a total of four bins for which we have to find storage.

In order to make use of the plastics receptacle we have to rinse out the empty containers, remove and dispose of the lids and then place the empty containers in said bin.

Newspapers then have to be dealt with. These have to be placed in the other receptacle next to the plastics receptacle.

In the meantime any cardboard, such as food packaging, toilet roll inners and suchlike has to be separated from any attached Sellotape or plastic padding to then be dismantled and flattened.

Generally, we pile all this material up by the front door, so that the next person who goes out takes it and deposits it in the correct receptacle.

Now our two wheelie bins have handles that are used to direct the bins into their allocated parking slots. The upshot of this is that the opening edge of the lid is at the opposite end of the bin to the handles. So with arms full of rubbish we have to manhandle a lid backwards to get it open.

Now that isn't too much of a problem unless it happens to be raining and the top of the lid has a puddle of water resting on it.

Then what happens is you flip the lid back and then your nice clean clothing is covered in water. By this time the wet ground has made all your 'rubbish' wet and dirty. Anyway, you put it in the bin, slam the lid and go back indoors to clean up.

Now this also happens with the identical 'brown' (black) bin, except this time you have a large white plastic bag crammed with household waste. This has been tied up with a convenient knot that seems to rip from the plastic material if you so much as think about using it to lift the bag, so you have to wrap your arms around it and 'cuddle' it.

Then you're faced with the lid problem again. Having put the bag down to open the lid you then discover that the bin has an added design feature that means it narrows as it gets to the bottom. This is brilliant because it limits the number of bags that fit at the bottom to just one.

So, as a solution, you stop filling the bags and take them out half-filled so you can slip them in sideways to make better use of the available space.

Anyway whichever way you do it, you're going to get dirty.

That brings me to the other two receptacles, which are especially worthy of mention because they are design icons.

First they have no lids. So all those newspapers you dutifully placed in the bin become soaking wet and twice their weight.

The other container, meanwhile, has a natty handle that means you have to consciously arrange your topless containers so that they all fit in. There's no throwing them in because they just bounce out.

I have a SuperDick T shirt for whoever dreamed this up.

Richard Ellis McCallum

Queens Road

Crowborough