Question: On an average day, how much rubbish do you throw out?

Answer: Too much!

I’ve enjoyed a good life and I don’t have many regrets, but I’ve often wished that we’d had wheelie bins when I was a kid.

When I think of the fun that we had with an old bike wheel, and the feeling of wealth that a set of pram wheels would bring, just imagine what an inventive young mind could have done do with a wheelie bin.

If you stood one upright, you would have the makings of a Ben Hur chariot, and if you laid one flat on the ground, you were well on the way towards a racing car.

Wheelie bins are relatively new to the island.

We were born in the round metal bin era. The bin wagon would come round every week and take our rubbish to the tip which, in our case, wasn’t very far. In fact Pulrose was surrounded by tips.

If you are of a certain age you will remember the Douglas Corporation bin lorries. They were side loading with sliding lids. Each house had its own round metal dust bin that was carried shoulder high from the back of the house and tipped into the lorry.

When the vehicle was full, it would drive to the current landfill site, tip the load, and go back to where it had left off.

We were a family of five, and our bin was rarely more than half full. Today, we are a family of two with a wheelie bin that has a capacity of about five times that of the old metal bins, and is quite often full to the top.

It was a fact of life that we just didn’t have anything to throw out. We had an open fire that disposed of everything that could be burned.

This included things such as potato peelings and the like. Any left over food would go to the dog or the cat.

We had very little glass to dispose of. Milk bottles were washed and returned and, as far as our family was concerned, wine bottles had yet to be invented. Jam jars were washed and saved, which just left an occasional sauce bottle to dispose of.

That left us with the ashes from our open fire and some garden waste. We just had nothing to throw away.

In fact, I suppose that most Pully kids, the ones who were regular tip scavengers, would take home more plunder than their families had thrown away.

In comparison with the old days, the amount of ’stuff’ that we put in our bin each week is huge.

Just take food packaging, Practically everything that you buy in the supermarket is double wrapped. Isn’t it time that we had a big re-think about our waste and what we do with it?

Until quite recently I didn’t know that each year the UK was exporting millions of tonnes of plastic waste to China. I don’t know what they did with it. They probably turned it into TV sets, false teeth, or even souvenir paperweights of models of the Terracotta Army in a snow storm.

But why can’t we process all this waste ourselves? I don’t know why, but I think we’re all going to find out sooner than later because the Chinese have decided that enough is enough.

Now in the Isle of Man we’ve got an incinerator that disposes of all our domestic and animal waste.

Don’t forget that the correct name for this incinerator is the ’energy from waste plant’, and if you look it up, you will find that it produces ten percent of our electricity requirements.

So why don’t we build another nine of these incinerators and charge the UK the going rate to dispose of their burnable rubbish?

If we played our cards right, we should be able to get free electricity.

I know, I’m being facetious, but the fact is, the world is becoming choked with rubbish, it’s running out of fossil fuel, and no-one has a great deal of time for wind turbines.