Rather than wait for an interesting story to come along, the Poorhouse thought we'd go with a laugh-at-stupid-people type snippet to do with bins...but in doing so perhaps opened a non-recyclable can of worms.

Wheelie bins may have been around for god knows how many years, but apparently they still hold the fear and mystique of strange new alien technology for some. So much so, that Epping Forest council is running roadshows to demonstrate how to use them. One might think that something in the shape of a bin with a big obvious lid and wheels on its base might be rather self explanatory, but according to the Telegraph via the New Statesman, people "will be able to see test runs by council officers who will explain the new technology". Further more, rubbish neophytes will get "to see samples and find out how easy they are to move", the aim being to "relieve [newcomer's] fears". Binophobia? It's just too easy to laugh.

However further investigation reveals that perhaps there is something to be slightly scared of after all.

Unbeknownst to many, the Government has been rather covertly putting wireless bugs in at least half a million wheelie bins. For many people, despite it having potential consequences for the individual and presumably coming out of the public purse, it wasn't until the Mail on Sunday broke the story that it came to light. Yes, it was the Mail, but it seems that it is actually true for a change - although in true ignorant racist Mail style they of course had to run with the headline "Germans plant bugs in our wheelie bins".

For what it's worth, the Germanic reference was nothing to do with the descent of our royal family who Mail readers probably quite like, but rather it so happens that the bin-sensors are largely being made by German firms.

So, the purpose of the bin bug? These are small RFID chips inserted under the lid of the bin which transmit a unique serial number. You can easily identify if you have one simply by looking for a small round battery-looking thing at the front of the underside of your bin lid. For now, the deal seems to be that your bin will be emptied by a bin lorry especially equipped with a RFID reader. Upon lifting it to be emptied, the serial number of your bin will be recorded along with the weight of its contents - i.e. an approximation of how much rubbish you are throwing away. This information is then transmitted to a central database.

The point of it all so far is a little ambiguous. Some councils have made the claim that it is there simply to resolve arguments between neighbours about whose bin is whose. The Poorhouse finds this quite laughable insomuch as a quick dab of a paintbrush would do the same at a lesser cost and allow a rather quicker more convenient detection scheme than bringing down someone with a chip reader.

A different council came up with a different (and better) excuse for the same thing, saying basically that it would allow the identification of areas who throw an unusually high amount of things away and hence probably aren't doing their best with regard to recycling. Some sort of pro-recycling education could then be targeted their way. This is a potentially rather laudable scheme but it seems that if true it has been gone about in a rather suspiciously covert way.

Most definitely each bin can be uniquely identified, so the potential is there to act on information about individuals. The feelings of the Mail and many others is that it is a precursor to a new tax on rubbish - hilariously dubbed "Pay as you throw" and "Chip and bin". Perhaps those of us who throw more than x amount of stuff away as opposed to recycling it will have to pay more for our bins to be collected. The selfish right wing is of course incandescent about the prospect of having to pay for doing above average damage to the environment.

The Poorhouse feels more charitably towards that particular idea. Pay per usage - as opposed to a flat proportion of the council tax - may well be the incentive people need to recycle and reuse more, and throw away less. Of course there are huge issues in terms of sneaking stuff in other people's bins and so on, but maybe a vaguely coherent scheme could be put together in time. It would of course be nice for certain councils to make recycling easier to do before going to these rather extreme measures first but hey, where common sense, environmental sensibility and decency fail it would be nice to fantasise that the invisible hand of market forces - which to be fair usually seem to cause the exact sort of mass-consumption problems that make vast and largely needless amounts of non-degradable rubbish in the first place - could be a force for good.

Where it could however become ever more Big Brother is when more and more shop-bought items coming with their own RFID chips in them. Famously, Gillette have been known to put such chips in their razor's packaging which has unnerved some people enough already. But once you've bought your razors and thrown away the packaging into your bin it would be easy enough - if someone found it desirable - for the bin lorry to detect exactly what that bit of rubbish was and how much of it there was and log it into their central database. Whilst it's hard to describe a bunch of rotting trash as a marketer's dream, there is potential commercial usage in such information one supposes, for behaviour monitoring, promotional targeting and so on.

For the more paranoid amongst you even in these pre universal-RFID days, Andrew Pelling MP (Tory), has suggested that burglars could hack into the database to analyse your recent waste quantity and determine if you were on holiday or not.