The amount of rubbish and the types of rubbish we recycle has changed over the years.

And not just what and how much is recycled has changed: the colour of bin you put the waste in and the sort of label or symbol on the bin has changed at different times in different places so now varies from city to city. Even within Copenhagen, the what and the where is different from one part of the city to the next. Some people would claim that you get a better sort of rubbish in Frederiksberg or Hellerup to the rubbish people throw away in Christianshavn but I'm not convinced.

But now, throughout Denmark, all this is to be rationalised and with standard graphics so, hopefully, you will no longer have to stand in front of a line of bins trying to work out what the symbol really means.

Now there will be ten different bins for ten types of waste.

…. but even here they seem to have forgotten batteries and is anyone completely sure when paper is too thick to be paper and becomes cardboard or at what point a pamphlet becomes a book?

All we do know for certain is that gone are the days when everything simply went into one bin and ended up at the district heating incinerator.