Is there now any point in recycling at all?

Out of sight, out of mind – it’s infuriating that our carefully separated waste is being dumped in landfill

You can always count on the Germans to be thorough. Consider recycling. They are world leaders, recycling more waste than any other country – between 56 and 65 per cent. I’m just back from visiting family there, and was struck by how far they go. Five bins in each household, ubiquitous deposit return schemes, fines for putting things in the wrong bins, or for having too much “restmüll” – unrecyclable rubbish.

Their thoroughness has rubbed off on me, and numerous visits over the years have made me a smug recycler. I regularly harangue my husband for placing things in the wrong bin (our part of London only has three, which I find frankly lacklustre), and tell off friends who don’t compost their food waste. I’m a recycling bore, often despairing how the UK lags behind, recycling only around 40 per cent of our waste – Taiwan, Slovenia and Italy all rank higher.

But still, we try. We separate our rubbish and fill up the smelly compost caddy and merrily wave off the local council lorry which comes to collect it. And then out of sight, out of mind. They’re dealing with it, we tell ourselves, magically reinventing our discarded stuff – so much stuff – into new bottles or shiny packaging or sturdy “bags for life”.

Except they’re not. According to new reports, we are now exporting much of our waste to Poland, where a “trash mafia” is diverting rubbish destined for recycling plants into landfill, or incinerating it.

Britain exports around 800,000 tonnes of plastic waste every year, most of it, until recently, to China. But China introduced a ban at the beginning of the year on the import of household plastics – a ban that adds an additional 111 million metric tons of global plastic to deal with by 2030.

The result, you might think, would be for us to process more of it here. Instead, we are still outsourcing the problem, exporting it to countries such as Vietnam, Malaysia and Poland. Again, out of sight, out of mind. While we might believe it is being shipped to recycling plants – registered as such, counting towards Britain’s recycling targets – much of it ends up in landfill.

So what of Germany, that bastion of waste management? They, too, export much of their plastic waste: just under 800,000 tonnes of it to China in 2016. But the difference is the quality. Like the similarly thorough Netherlands, they separate their rubbish, which makes recyclables easier to sell on the international market. In the UK, councils collect mixed recyclables, which contaminate each other, making them much harder to recycle. The result is to send much of it to landfill, illegally or otherwise. Different rules from council to council on what they can and can’t collect don’t help.

Not only is the system defective, but importers are also pushing back. Mateusz Morawiecki, the Polish prime minister, has threatened a total ban on waste imports, and Asian countries are clamping down, too. Vietnam recently stopped issuing waste import permits.

So what next? The worst thing to do is for us to decide it’s all a scam and give up. We all saw Blue Planet, and we all know that’s not an option. Maybe the problem isn’t at our end. We’re doing our bit, even if the rules are infuriating, so perhaps the focus should be on what we’re buying in the first place. Incentives such as Michael Gove’s introduction of a German-style deposit return scheme will encourage us to recycle more, yes – but surely the onus should be on the supplier, not us.

Theresa May encouraged supermarkets to introduce a plasticfree aisle earlier this year, making it easier for shoppers to buy products that aren’t packaged in plastic. And there is talk of a plastic tax; the European Commission is considering one on virgin plastics to make recycled plastics more attractive for producers. British recycling companies, meanwhile, hope the threat of not being able to export waste to the EU post-brexit will force the Government to overhaul its recycling plan in its Resources and Waste Strategy, published later this year.

The 21st century is one of convenience. That’s unlikely to change, so it needs to be easy for us, as consumers. Producers can and should make it more convenient for us to use less stuff. Make it easier for us to use less, and we’ll need to recycle less, too. We can do this and we should. Being as smug as the Germans is just a bonus.