Sorting rubbish at home takes only a few minutes a day. Most households now maintain three separate bins: one for paper, one for plastic and metal, and one for food waste that will eventually be composted. The arrangement operates perfectly well as long as the rules stay simple and the labels remain unambiguous. Whenever people are uncertain which bin a particular item belongs in, they tend to give up and put everything into one bag, and the whole bag is then treated as ordinary rubbish and buried.