I’ve bottled up my anger, but recycling is an ugly business

If driving to work tomorrow after the bank holiday, you happen to pass a bottle bank, the chances are that you will avert your gaze. writes Terry Prone. 

Bottle banks always look, after even an ordinary weekend, as if they’ve been the site of a weird war involving bottles, cartons, and plastic bags, all scattered around the ugliest metal containers ever designed. Those containers, brown and green and raucous pink structures, have a stylistic relationship to Sherman tanks. They are effectively abandoned in public parking areas and shopping centre car parks, and they are a blot on the landscape.

Every time I visit one of them, I come away with my teeth ground down to little nubs. First of all, because here’s a collection of devices meant to evoke and inculcate good environmental practice, yet they have been designed and placed in a way that is so challengingly repellent that it’s a wonder anybody ever uses them.