Where there's muck, there's brass; this is as true today as it ever was. There's always cash to be made from the salvaging and rendering of materials like bottles, newspapers and cans. Household waste represents a potential goldmine.

A Blue Peter campaign from years ago encouraged children to save the foil inner wrappers from their chocolate bars to help buy puppies for training as Guide Dogs for the Blind. The "silver" paper collected, which would otherwise have ended up in a hole in the ground, was then sold to scrap-metal merchants.

Once a disposable material has become a tradeable commodity, it is subject to market fluctuations; hence, now the bottom has fallen out of the waste newspaper recycling industry. No one wants to buy, so we have mountains of the stuff littering all corners of the country.

The imperatives thrust upon us dictating how much as a nation we are permitted to send to landfill, what we are obliged to recycle, etc, etc, emanate from Brussels, whose own shortsighted, knee-jerk response to the waste management problem would appear to be to attempt to make money on the back of misfortune; EU coffers look set to bulge handsomely from the levying of fat fines on Joe Public who, at the bottom of the chain, will be pinched hard if his local council fails to meet wildly-ambitious European "targets".

The Landfill Allowance Trading System (LATS), which likewise does nothing to address the waste problem at source, is little more than a dubious free-for-all of number-shuffling, wideboy dealing and profit-making,

Packaging manufacturers flood the consumer market with ludicrously over-wrapped goods, especially gift products, at times like Easter and Christmas. Printing companies waste paper and ink churning out glossy leaflets which are stuffed into Sunday newspaper supplements, and are junked soon after. These are the people who need clobbering with swingeing penalties, not the long-suffering consumer.

Bristol City Council is just as guilty in its production of the Joint Waste Strategy handout itself. Ten A4 pages could and should have been condensed into a document one quarter of the size and cost, beginning by getting rid of the 18 unnecessary colour pictures that were included.

The title of the pamphlet stems from the politics behind it. A "Joint Waste Strategy" (covering four local authorities: Bristol City Council, North Somerset, Bath & North East Somerset and South Gloucestershire) means that, although they are still legally obliged to dispose of waste, being shoved together in the artificial European South West region denies them the independence to make their own decisions.

So, for B&NES to announce that it has "withdrawn" from the incineration option is pure fantasy. It does what it is told by the unelected South West Regional Assembly, and the incineration option is very much what SWRA is pushing for, judging from the heavily weighted language; witness questionable statements like "new recovery and disposal facilities will (note, not "may") need to be built...", "58 per cent (of whom, how many people were canvassed, and where?) chose energy from Waste (ie, incineration) as their preferred technology option".

Particularly disturbing is the unsubstantiated claim on page 8 that energy from waste (ie, incineration) "is safe and clean".

Waste industry apologists would have us believe that they will build only small incinerators, to keep alive the option of recycling.

This is pure garbage as, once an incinerator is built, mere permissions are all that will be needed to increase its size.

And what about the material burnt? What's to stop this morphing from innocuous household waste, to industrial waste, then to hazardous waste?

As well as dodgy science, the JWS is also reliant on economic blackmail. Page 2 of the booklet attempts to pile on the pressure by announcing that the waste disposal problem is set to worsen," with 100,000 new homes coming to the West of England in the next 20 years...". But no evidence or justification for these figures is provided.

There have been, during the past year, distinctly murky revelations in the world of waste management which escape mention in the JWS, but which continue to surface now and then; the notion of replacing weekly bin collections with a fortnightly service still lingers like a bad smell; latest newspaper reports suggest that a handful of local authorities are considering a system which replaces individual house waste bins with one communal facility per street.

It has been further suggested that residents who put their bins out on the "wrong" day or in the "wrong" place or the "wrong" distance from the kerb may be fined, as may those whose bins are not content-sorted accurately enough to satisfy the municipal litter-snoopers.

Worse, the Mail and Telegraph among others, ran a story recently concerning a number of local authorities which were apparently making no attempt to recycle, but were sending ALL their household waste to landfill.

What the report does make clear is that much of the waste generated locally is shunted outside our area, although we are not told where. Does anybody know? Do they even care? Is it a case of "out of sight, out of mind?"

And why, as the The Independent reported a while ago, are container-loads of waste from the UK turning up in China?

I dispute the claim made in this report that "high-profile con- sultations" have taken place to gauge what the public want. Admittedly, the first of these in Bath was in an upper room at the Guildhall, but the second was hidden away at the top of the west stand at the rugby ground, of all places, unsignposted, and consequently badly attended.

It was hosted by a representative from Jacobs UK, which describes itself as waste recovery con- sultants. Hardly surprising, then, that discussion was skewed in favour of "recovery" and not recycling.

Municipal waste collection has long been contracted out to privateers. In Bath, the city council has sold out to French outfit Sita. And this is where we came in.

The impression I come away with from the whole set-up is that the Joint Waste Strategy is a farce, whereby the vested interests are allowed to increase their profits while, at the sharp end, muggins taxpayer is hoodwinked into believing that he can influence what is being planned.

I, for one, will not be incinerating the JWS leaflet. No, I intend to recycle it – straight into the nearest wastepaper basket.