The wrong kind of recycling

When I first moved to Brighton nearly 20 years ago, it wasn't a very clean city. The combination of poor council services and seagulls pecking at bin bags meant there was always litter everywhere.

Over the years it has improved a lot. We now have communal bins, various industrial relations problems were resolved and there is regular street cleaning which works well.

Then along comes the Green council (only one in the country) which seems happy to create lots of unnecessary senior management jobs at £125k a pop but decides to instigate a pay review that makes the refuse collectors substantially worse off. Not surprisingly they went on strike for three days. That combined with very high winds meant that the city was covered in litter spread far and wide. Not the kind of recycling we want.