Oxford City Council is talking rubbish, again. Hard on the heels of the IPPR suggesting that the only way to radically improve recycling is to charge for rubbish collections by weight, it seems that, according to the Oxford Mail, Bin Brother is watching you - the new wheelie bins being, er, rolled out across Oxford from later this autumn will be "IPPR Ready".

Now, when I first saw it, I thought "what a terrible thing for a Lib Dem council to be doing, introducing spies on drives". I see Labour's John Tanner harping on about cost, which is apparently negligible per bin, to which the response of the Lib Dem administration seems to be that it would be better value to plan for this rubbish charging scheme now than have to replace or retrofit the bins in a couple of years time.

You don't need to fit the technology on your trucks of course, at £15k a pop according to the Oxford Mail article. You don't have to use the spyware technology until and unless it becomes compulsory to do so. And I don't think that the Institute for Pre-packaged Policy Rubbish is yet of the level of influence where one report of theirs turns quickly into law (thank goodness).

Of course the technology could be used to prove how regressive such a tax on rubbish could be. That must be it. There could be no better reason for a Lib Dem authority wanting to capture such information, could there?

But you know, maybe the IPPR isn't so far from the right direction after all. For if you charge for collections, surely you must also open them up to competition? It was something that we mulled on but did not resolve when we were trying to allocate functions to area committees here in Oxford, with waste collection ruled to be something that could not be achieved in the then market at smaller contract levels than city wide - so we could not allow area committees for example to decide to take a contract out with a different firm to do collection.

Why should waste collection and disposal be a public "service"? It was required once, just as public bath-houses and steamies were required, for public hygiene in an era when more or less untreatable epidemics were spread by (mostly organic) rubbish in the streets. Surely it is the very definition of a "nanny state" to be clearing up our mess after us? And whilst we have spent billions over the decades ensuring that we are free from the state in matters of personal hygiene and our laundry, we have done very little about technologies to deal with our own rubbish.

And it is our rubbish. There's isn't a lot of certainty in life but virtually every ounce we throw out we have at some stage voluntarily brought into our households. If we can get all that packaging back home from the shops when we buy the goods, surely it would be uncontentious to suggest that we take it back with us next time we go out?

It is easier to bill and reward a few bigger organizations - those competing businesses that will offer to collect our rubbish or pick it up from a mutually convenient place, like back at the supermarket or shopping centre. Land Value Tax might prize scarce landfill sites so that collection and disposal firms have incentives to be ever more inventive about how to reduce landfill. Similarly, Land Value Tax in the form of pollution taxes could control other disposal mechanisms like incineration versus "energy from waste".

The ability to take your empty tin cans back to a shop could be an added inducement to shop there maybe. People might be swayed by how much they have to take back into buying or demanding things with less packaging in the first place, or shopping in stores that use minimal packaging (like local traditional shops rather than out of town once a week supermarkets). Most supermarkets will already deliver your rubbish to your door, complete with its temporary contents of course, why not collect the empties at the same time?

Most people do not want to live in squalor. So if the nanny state is not handling their rubbish (at extremely dubious value for money) or other, competing, mechanisms offer a better value service, they will I am sure soon learn to use them. That leaves "the community" to police the system and enforce in the common good against those few people whose unwillingness to deal with their own rubbish impacts on others, or assist those who simply cannot deal with their own rubbish for some reason. Already we are free not to throw out anything. Already some people do, and for them we have environmental health officers who can step in to ensure their habits do not affect neighbours or the vulnerable.

And that community need not be a city, it could be a residents' association, an apartment block management company or committee, a parish council hiring the monthly village skip, or a neighbourhood action group setting policing priorities for the area. An apartment block - through its freeholder and the leaseholders, or the landlord and its tenants - can be responsible for their share, deciding either to take a contract out for someone to collect residual waste or to find ways of reducing or recycling it - making compost for the communal gardens or the local allotments. So this need not be "privatisation" so much as "mutualisation".

Red text is what's quoted in the Guardian, p2, 30/08/06