With good reason, Kim du Toit is ranting over this plan by the Brits to intimidate more people into recycling.

A council is putting microchips in all 100,000 of its wheelie bins to monitor whether householders are recycling enough of their rubbish.

The 50,000 households in the South Norfolk district council area are being issued with two bins - a grey one for run-of-the-mill rubbish and a green one for plastic bottles, cans, paper and cardboard that can be recycled.

Dustcarts will empty grey bins one week and green ones the next, with on-board scanning equipment weighing each one and identifying which home the contents come from.

Over time, officials in the Liberal Democrat-controlled council will be able to calculate which households are backsliding on recycling and then advise them on how to do better.

Kim notes that the first thing he'd do is keep switching all the bins with his neighbors. Sounds effective, but it implies that you're still going to put your recycle bin down there every other week. Personally, I think I'd just paint the green one gray and thank the city for the extra trash bin. And the first piece of trash to go in it would be that embedded microchip that I carved out with my unregistered knife.