You can tell a lot about a society by its rubbish. What its people eat and drink, make and break, treasure or discard. More importantly in the modern age, what they recycle.

Our household, like most in York, expends much time sorting our rubbish into plastic, paper and glass, to be collected every fortnight. A chore, but one that feels worth it. Other people use the recycling banks dotted all around the city. After all, nothing is more important than saving the planet, given recent UN reports on imminent climate breakdown.

How depressing then to learn the Environment Agency (EA) is investigating widespread complaints that organised criminals and firms are abusing the plastics recycling rules and environmental safeguards. So far six UK exporters of plastic waste have had their licences suspended or cancelled in the last three months, according to EA statistics. In the last three years, one company alone has had 57 containers of plastic waste stopped at UK ports due to concerns over contamination of waste.

The Environment Agency is confronting a litany of allegations that exporters are falsely claiming for tens of thousands of tonnes of plastic waste which might not exist. More worryingly, that UK plastic waste is not being recycled and is being left to leak into rivers and oceans, and that UK firms with serial offences of shipping contaminated waste are being allowed to continue exporting.

Let’s be clear, this is big business. UK households and businesses used 11m tonnes of packaging last year, according to government figures. And two-thirds of our plastic packaging waste is exported by an industry worth more than £50m last year.

After Carillion and Capita, the fact that the government have allowed yet another scandal involving poorly regulated private contractors to milk the taxpayer does not come as a surprise. Privatisation and outsourcing benefits the shareholders and well-heeled individuals the Conservative Party represents, and recycling is a profitable sector with a clear future.

Meanwhile, what concerns us ‘little people’ is whether our time spent sorting rubbish for recycling is actually benefitting the environment.

In York, over 11,000 tonnes of recyclable material was collected in 2017/18 from street collections outside people’s homes, with a further 8,000 tonnes collected from recycling banks. That sounds a lot. But according to letsrecycle.com, City of York Council was ranked 191 out of 350 English local authorities when it came to the total recycling, composting and reuse rate of household waste between April 2016 and March 2017.

This is clearly not good enough. In addition, the council-owned company that recycles plastic, Yorwaste, only recycles certain types of plastic waste because these are more profitable to sell. The rest – and the bulk of the plastic you put in your box – is sent off for disposal in the UK and abroad. Now, no one is implying Yorwaste’s current practice is unethical or against regulations. But I would ask whether it is ambitious enough.

So here are a few modest suggestions for York.

Firstly, reduce plastic use right across the city through education and campaigns to encourage consumer pressure on retailers to reduce packaging. The council should also aim to become a plastic free organisation wherever possible – and publicly report its progress towards that target.

Next, introduce a bottle deposit return scheme so citizens are rewarded for recycling. This would have instant results, as would installing street water fountains for people to top up their water bottles. And why not ask local schools to design a re-usable water bottle given out to all residents for free – The York Bottle.

We should also encourage the government to introduce a regionalised recycling system that is standardised across the country, to end the fact some authorities collect very few plastics compared to near neighbours. This is, of course, a national issue as much as a local one.

It is almost impossible to think of a better use for taxpayers’ money than a world-beating recycling system in the UK. One geared around environmental needs rather than private outsourcing. Let’s get investing for the public good.