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Those of us who love London must feel ashamed this week.
It is the world's most interesting city, a place of uncommon delights, yet it has been shown by an influential report to have one of the most delinquent attitudes in Europe towards waste.
Even Bucharest does better than skanky London. In Paris, the lorries take away smaller amounts of rubbish - and they take it away every day.
We stuff our bins indiscriminately and leave them lying out for a week.
Our crimes are multiple: we chuck away a great deal more to start with, and 78 per cent of that is sent to landfill or for burning. This is a colossal figure.
It leaves only 22 per cent for recycling, an effort for which the word "feeble" might have been invented. In Copenhagen, the percentage going to landfill is one per cent.
London is a sophisticated place. It has a history of public benevolence and pulling together. Why is it proving so hard to convince people that careless waste disposal is an ugly and shocking business?
In Berlin, they accepted the task of recycling without blinking. Why do people in London still feel you can take it or leave it, as if pollution was a lifestyle choice?
In fact, when it comes to the environment, waste abuse is more like a life-or-death choice. Despite councils facing giant penalties for poor recycling, London citizens imagine that the whole thing is something invented by irritating hippies or the nanny state.
How come so many other Europeans see it as an intelligent matter, an uncontroversial attempt to do the right thing and protect our natural resources, while London can't?
A couple of years ago, I spent a whole season following London rubbish.
I went out with the bin lorries at four in the morning, I followed kitchen trash to landfill sites in Buckinghamshire and incinerators in Edmonton.
I met with recyclers and kamikaze "dumpster-divers", people who wouldn't accept the amounts that London businesses were throwing out at the end of each day.
It stuck in my mind what one of those "Freegans" said during a night raid on the bins at a Peckham supermarket. "We choose our ignorance," he said.
It seemed true enough at the time, but, with this week's study by the company Suez Environnement, we must face the fact that London is choosing ignorance to an inordinate degree.
We still imagine that our rubbish is taken "away" - but there is no such place as "away".
Most of it is buried in the fields around London, where it lies suppurating for decades, sending toxic emissions into the air and spoiling the countryside.
One of the Harrow refuse-collectors I went out with was astonished at the London attitude. "It's a nightmare," said Joshi. "No matter how many times you give them information they still contaminate the bloody recycling bins. They hide all sorts of stuff at the bottom of the organic bins - like machine parts. There's no telling them."
He showed me one of the bins outside a large house; it had grass on the top and Tesco bags full of paper underneath.
Harrow has a system of compulsory recycling: green bins for paper, cans and bottles, and brown bins for organic waste, which includes garden waste and leftover food.
People in Harrow who mix the stuff up, or "contaminate", have their rubbish left uncollected, and must pay £20 to get it picked up, after they've sorted it.
Persistent offenders can be prosecuted and fined up to £1,000. Such schemes are in operation in many London boroughs, but still people can't be bothered.
The Government used to speak of having national recycling rates of 40 per cent by 2010.
They believed it would happen, and, even so, Friends of the Earth argued that they should be heading for 75 per cent by 2015.
Yet, far from reaching the lower of these targets, London is actually sliding backwards. The idea that rubbish can go "away" is proving a terrible obstacle.
Not since the years prior to 1956, before the Clean Air Act, has London faced such a generally accepted hazard to public health.
The landfill sites and the incinerators have made strides towards renewable energy, but there is still far too much trash going into them.
"Out of sight, out of mind". That's the philosophy of the average London bin-stuffer. But if you follow that trash to the end of its life, what you find is that there is no end to its life: it goes on being a danger.
Once seen, the trainloads of rubbish coming into the Calvert landfill site in Buckinghamshire from London (five days a week, four trains a day, each train with 50 trucks of rubbish) can never be forgotten.
We are strangely resistant to shame on the issue of waste. We don't see the mess and we don't feel the injury immediately, so we allow ourselves to think that our behaviour is normal.
But what the new report reveals is that London is facing an utter crisis on the issue. We have allowed ourselves to become the fifth dirtiest city in Europe.
The failure is not merely economic or social, it is, if you like, cultural and philosophical. We take pride in many things - many stupid things - but not in the survival of our own space, the cleanness of our water, the purity of our air. Something in our culture allows us to think it doesn't matter.
Despite our own progressive traditions, and despite recent economic lessons, London is still a place where the citizens are enslaved to commodities at any price.
Robin Murray of the London School of Economics put the case clearly in his book Zero Waste: "The idea that waste could be useful, that it should come in from the cold and take its place at the table of the living, is one that goes far beyond the technical question of what possible use could be made of this or that. It challenges the whole way we think of things and their uses."
How we think. That's the key. The report this week proves that, compared to the more enlightened capitals of old and new Europe, we are not thinking.
London is heading towards becoming a city famous for its lack of civic responsibility. Famous for its hills of rubbish and its careless attitude. Is that what we want?
Andrew O'Hagan's book of essays The Atlantic Ocean has just come out in paperback from Faber & Faber.
Reader views (6)
Why have no English councils replicated what foreign cities do, where the public street bins are split into four or five compartments: one for general waste, one for paper, one for metal etc.? Every bin I have seen in England is just a one compartment, general waste, bin. By changing all street bins to receptacles for recycling material then you will help to change people's mindset towards rubbish.
- Ross, London, England, 08/10/2009 18:00
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Carsten, if everyone would just recycle all their paper, glass and plastic bottles, we'd be recycling over 50%. I live in Brent where that's a simple matter of putting the paper, glass and bottles in a green box separate from the bin ... why do so few people bother? It's compulsory, and I'm now coming around to the view that the persistent non-recyclers should be fined. Why should I be paying through my council tax for their laziness?
And on another issue - why aren't all shops that sell electrical gadgets obliged to have recycling collection points for broken small electrical stuff? The only thing worse than land-filling a broken computer mouse or electric toothbrush, is burning ten miles of fuel in a car in order to recycle it at the council waste depot.
- Nigel, London, 08/10/2009 17:58
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I live in Westminster and as far as I can tell the only recycling point I have near to me is for cardboard. But why is there not a decent recycling point for glass/cans/etc within walking distance?
I have also read that a lot of stuff that is put in recycling receptacles actually ends up in landfills anyway because the cost of recycling is too high.
- Rob, London, UK, 08/10/2009 16:48
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Maybe because every new law in place since the champagne socialists took over in this country now has "failure to do so may result in a fine of £xxxxx and a criminal record" that many people feel stuff it doesn't mean anything.
Maybe try educating people instead of threatening to criminalise them by sticking a wrapper in the wrong bag.
- Paul, Ealing, 08/10/2009 14:24
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I work in London as an Street Environment Officer and I have found that no matter how much you educate or fine people for dumping rubbish they take no notice,the attitude that prevails appears to be so long as its not in my house its no longer a problem, I too have found car engines in paper recyling bins!!
- Kim Brookes, London, 08/10/2009 12:50
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One point to add is that supermarkets in the UK choose to use packaging, mostly plastic, which cannot be recycled. If you look at plastics used in countries such as Germany, you will find a green recycle point on almost all of them. Once the supermarkets do their part and the local authorities make it possible to recycle more items such as TetraPac, then we can safely recycle all packaging and separating rubbish will be an easy task. At the moment, apart from obvious resources such as paper, glass or green waste, it is just confusing and I can't really blame people for not caring.
- Carsten, London, 08/10/2009 11:55
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