I realise it is one of the oldest clichés there is, but the notion that the years seem to pass more quickly the older one gets sometimes feels very true, especially when bringing up young children.

It doesn’t seem five minutes ago we were hanging up nappies to dry for our baby who is rapidly heading towards his fourth birthday, and we now find ourselves in the conversation about primary school choices. Never mind doing it all over again with number two, who has already cut his third tooth!

We are now well into the stage where many of the conversations with the eldest consist of finding good answers to the constant question: ‘Why, Daddy?’ His awareness of the world around him grows by the day, and sometimes the answers are hard to find, but like all parents, we do our best.

Now, you might imagine that given the work I do, it was quite likely that my little lad would receive plenty of rubbish-related gifts as he advanced in years. Indeed, that has proven to be the case, and none of them have been provided by me so far, as friends and family rally round to oblige! So, he is the proud owner of a model street sweeper, a very large model side-loading RCV badged for single stream co-mingled recycling (thanks to my sister blissfully unaware of the irony) and another vehicle with separate holes labelled up for paper, plastics and glass.

Add to this a couple of decent children’s books about recycling and litter and you begin to get the picture. Even the fleet of Sodor engines has been recently enhanced by the arrival of Whiff, the smelly and dirty green engine with big glasses that collects the rubbish on the Fat Controller’s railway. No stereotyping of the waste industry there then...

I’m not saying that rubbish features all the time in the Georgeson household playtime, because in truth it doesn’t. But we do pick up litter when walking to the park (not when on scooters or bikes), which he sometimes likes doing, and the recycling book does sometimes feature in his bedtime reading choices. I hope my former schools programme colleagues at Waste Watch would be proud!

Imagine my surprise (and inevitable parental pride) the other day, when we were taking the household recycling on its journey from the kitchen to the green wheeled bin in the yard. Bear in mind this is the boy that knows from his recycling book that paper gets made back into newspapers and boxes, plastic bottles get made back into bottles and other plastic things, and glass gets melted down and turned back into glass bottles again. Standing on a crate to open the wheelie bin, readying himself to empty the kitchen container into the bin, he opens it up and says: “Daddy, it just looks like rubbish. What does it get made into?”

So, I attempt to explain co-mingling to my toddler, who likes to take care with the recycling and reads his bedtime book assiduously. And no, I am not going to try and recreate my explanation here. Let’s just wait for the Children’s Guide (aged 4-7 years) to the MRF Code of Practice to be published. I am sure it will make great and gripping bedtime reading.