Wordsmith with Martin Smith

You know it. I know it.

Those green people have been telling us for ages and - now it suits them - even the politicians are forever vocalising the issue.

Yet it still seems to be too much of an effort to recycle our recycleables.

A stubborn few of us, it seems, want someone to actually turn up, knock on the door and grab that empty Pinot Grigio bottle out of our hand before we do our bit to reduce the global meltdown.

So, old habits are hard to break. But it is beginning to sound like we have no choice.

Yet, still we're getting wingeing suburbanites moaning on national news bulletins about nasty niffs outside their neo-Georgian pads because the bin man comes only every other week now.

Perhaps what is a more alarming sight - more so even than seagulls the size of Alsatians dive-bombing bulging landfill sites - are the bins outside student homes here in South Yorkshire.

More often than not they are over-flowing within 48 hours of the refuse truck trundling by - and not just with the stuff that cannot be turned into pram handles or something else useful in another industrial life.

Take a stroll down Sheffield's Ecclesall Road or every other street in those academic slumberlands of Crookes and Broomhill after the weekend and you are all but tripping over a pandemic of Carling cans or a glass mountain of Becks and merlot empties.

Why is this alarming?

Well, beyond the simple fact that it is wasteful and plain lazy this is the work of the so-called future generation.

Those seemingly bright young things with a 21st century conscience who should be leading the charge of the Green Brigade, not being impossibly oblivious to the plight of the planet we're supposed to be helping to save for them and their offspring.

We all know the developing world has it's problems and its needs - and I am bound to get shot down as a hypocrite for the carbon footprint I created to get there - but this imbalance was brought tragically home to me during a charity trip to Malawi.

Village kids outside the comparably prosperous towns of Zomba and Lilongwe were climbing over eachother to get their hands on our empty plastic water bottles.

Without getting into too much of an ethical debate, that is surely the ultimate form of recycling, based on a simple theory: re-use or go thirsty.

So, it makes you wonder where we go with all this. I’m not suggesting for one moment we ship all our empties off to east Africa as that would defeat the object.

But cripes, it does make you think a little: if someone cannot be bothered to place a couple of used plastic bottles in somewhere other than a hole in the ground when they go via their local well-stocked supermarket there’s got to be very little hope for our species.

Ho hum.

Losing my faith in those little snacks

I’VE just lost a little of my faith in Wheat Crunchies.

You know what we’re talking about, those little crunchy snacks that (a tad ironically) look a bit like pieces of furred artery.

A big fan of the noisy tubes, they have something in common with their traditional crisp relations in that more often than not the darker the colouring the more flavour they have attached to them.

Except I’ve just tucked into a bag of “crispy bacon” variety - in lieu of the preferred “spicy tomato” being available - and found not one but two Crunchies almost orange in colour. Imagine the disappointment to find they were not, in fact, more bacon-y than their yellower companions but just over-cooked.

Yes, I know there are worst things in life.