I'VE found a use for my new green wheelie-bin - in the short term at least.

Like many others with gardens, we compost most of our garden and green kitchen waste and burn or bury the rest. So we have nothing to put in our green bin.

I did consider painting it black so I could put out two black bins a fortnight instead of one.

However since we've been promised that plastic will be added to the roadside recycling collections next March, our green bin will spend the winter gradually filling with recyclable plastic: mostly food packaging, milk containers, shampoo bottles and the like, all rinsed clean and squashed. It'll be interesting to see whether or not it's full long before March!

Meanwhile, with four teenagers in the house, after the first week our black bin is only a third full, instead of almost full. Was the rest really all plastic?

Andrew Dunn,

Acaster Lane,

Bishopthorpe, York.

Updated: 10:23 Wednesday, October 12, 2005