WELL, the wheelie bin revolution is finally upon us, and I seem to have become a bit of a demon recycler.

I'd like to say that pressing concerns over climate change and an overwhelming urge to save the planet are behind my frenzied mission to crush, wash and squash everything in sight, but that would be a lie.

No, I just keep looking at that plastic bin and then at the half-dozen black bags we manage to amass each week, and wondering how on earth something so big is going to fit inside something so small.

There is only one solution: recycle - and I've gone at it with gusto.

As always, the children are bearing the brunt of my incessant nagging; just last night I gave them the Spanish Inquisition after I spotted - gasp, horrors! - an envelope in the kitchen bin. After five minutes or so of ranting about how those orange boxes weren't just there to make the house look pretty (what I said) and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah (what they heard), I realised that I might be over-reacting slightly and shut up. It had nothing at all to do with the fact that the offending envelope was actually on top of a cereal packet I'd thrown in there earlier.

Anyway, my newfound enthusiasm for recycling has come as a bit of a surprise to the children, who have spent the past few years moaning that ours is not an environmentally-friendly home. Until recently, my idea of recycling was to save the empty loo roll tubes to send in for junk modelling at school.

But I'm sure if the kids had realised that being environmentally-friendly would mean picking through their bedroom bins, flattening out sheets of waste paper and rinsing plastic bottles, they would have kept their mouths shut.

Our youngest son is the worst culprit for being wasteful. A great artist, he loves to sit at his desk and draw. Like all great artists, though, he gets through reams of drafts before his masterpiece is complete - we could fill the orange recycling box to the brim with his rejected sketches each week.

Our eldest son has quite a serious Coke habit. He gets through gallons of the stuff. Yet for a child who can talk eloquently about the depletion of the ozone layer and how melting ice caps are threatening the polar bear population, he seems surprisingly unable to crush a can. Funny that.

Meanwhile we, the adults of the house, are actually quite good at utilising the recycling boxes. No sooner have they emptied the one we use for glass bottles than it's full to the top again.

I guess I have to hand it to Swindon Council - the wheelie bin scheme may not be the most popular idea in the borough, but if it's forcing people like me to think about going green, it's doing some good.

And there's even a little glimmer of hope for my children. I found a four-day-old ham sandwich down the side of my eldest son's bed the other day. When I asked him what it was doing there, he replied: "I was saving it for later."

If that's not recycling, I don't know what is.