One morning recently as we emerged from the house, my four-year-old inquired: "Shall I shout at the binmen?" Since the men who were collecting our rubbish are as efficient and courteous as anyone could wish, I hurried her into the car suggesting this would not be such a great idea.

Questioning revealed that she was merely attempting to put into practice her understanding of her mother's latest political stance. She had heard me expounding about the imminent arrival of wheelie bins on our street and the approach to recycling of Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Council.

The leaflet from the council went along these lines. Following our payment of £150 per household in waste charges, the council is limiting us to one bin in an attempt to reduce the amount of domestic waste and make the whole collection process cleaner and more efficient. It is quite stern.

"The 240-litre bin should be sufficient for your needs. Extra bags etc will not be taken." Good idea.

The council is urging us to use local recycling facilities "where possible" to cut down on the amount of waste going to landfills. Since 91 per cent of Irish municipal waste goes into landfills compared with 11 per cent in Denmark and 30 per cent in Sweden, I couldn't agree more.

My problem with the leaflet was disappointment. I had been under the misapprehension that our £150 payment would herald a whole new dawn of kerbside recycling collection. I envy relatives who have been recycling under the kerbside scheme for what seems like years and were recently issued with a second wheelie bin in which their recyclables are collected.

Instead, I must find local recycling facilities and the leaflet did not say where they might be. Nor was there any recognition that to reach them with bulky waste assumes that the householder is, firstly, ablebodied, which many of my neighbours are not and, secondly, has independent transport which is not necessarily the case. Never mind the environmental consequences of each household driving to deliver waste instead of one vehicle collecting from many households.

In our house the biggest problem is newspapers, which accumulate inexorably. Once we could bring them to a recycling skip at a local shopping centre. Since that disappeared my newspapers have gone out with the rubbish. Aware that our newspaper mountain will not fit in the wheelie bin, last week I phoned the Wheeled Bin Helpline.

The helpful council spokeswoman explained that newspapers could be brought to the mobile recycling service on the third or fourth Saturday of the month or to the recycling service at the dump. Recycling information had been available in the council's free newspaper and would be posted to me forthwith, which it was. This solves my immediate problem but doesn't answer the larger question of why the more economic and greener approach of kerbside collection is not available to everyone.

Journalistic inquiries at a more senior level elicited this explanation. Of the 60,000 households in the county council area, 12,500 have a door-to-door recycling service which will be extended to a further 6,250 in the next few months. That leaves more than 40,000 households still driving around chasing the mobile recyclers or trekking to the dump.

The mobile recycling collection service is available for two hours in one location on two days each month. The council clearly doesn't expect householders to respond to the arrival of their wheelie bins with a conversion to recycling.

I asked the senior council official when the kerbside service might reach us all. She responded that the plan was to have "household collection for 80 per cent of households on a phased basis over a number of years". How many years? "When resources permit."

Whence might these resources emanate? Forget the Government. A spokesman for the Department of the Environment explained that while the Minister, Noel Dempsey, is working on a policy statement on waste recovery, which would outline measures to support "a better national recycling performance", the Government would not pay for these. The Government supports the "polluter pays" principle.

This principle is fine, in principle, but in practice how much does the Government intend local authorities to raise in local taxation? Does the Government seriously expect a realistic strategy of waste management without exchequer support?

Remember that this Government, which wants to put the full cost of reducing our waste onto local government and by implication onto local charges, is the same Government which believes in cutting taxes in a way which favours higher earners. Local waste charges, meanwhile, bear equally on all households whatever their level of income.

In its present manifestation, the "polluter pays" principle is a compatible companion to other Government principles such as "public services are not a priority" and "let's concentrate tax relief on the rich".

It is an elastic principle, permitting cuts in excise duties on petrol as a way of lowering inflation. If the "polluter pays" principle were applied to road transport, duty should be increased and used to fund public transport. But that would conflict with the "public services are not a priority" principle.

I explained to my four-year-old that we would not shout at the binmen but we would tell canvassing politicians that our votes depended on a convincing recycling strategy. "That's blackmail," she commented.

Roll out the wheelie bins. Roll on the election.

mawren@irish-times.ie