“There are a lot of myths about concerning recycling”.

These words were spoken by Eric Pickles MP, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, during a recent television interview. They captured my attention because although I support in principle the need for waste to be recycled, I am confused and sceptical about the postcode lottery that has developed over how it is done.

When the warm weather arrives, I curse the politicians at County Hall who have condemned me to only having general household waste collected every two weeks.

Despite my best efforts to keep bad smells and maggot infestation to a minimum, my wheelie bin for general waste is not a pretty sight or odour with several days left before it is emptied.

I really feel for those parts of the UK where the local councils are forcing on householders a three-weekly collection of general household waste.

Mr Pickles went on to give his informed opinion that there was no reason why waste should not be collected weekly and the proliferation of multi-coloured wheelie bins outside our homes is unnecessary.

The Minister made it clear that he favoured the system that some councils had adopted of retaining the single bin/weekly collection approach. Householders did not have to sort the rubbish.

This was done at the waste management plant by a machine that was capable of segregating lorry loads collected from bins into general waste, plastic, paper, metal etc.

The machine needed to do this required a multi-million pound investment but, as the Minister pointed out, the firms that had invested in these would not have done so if they knew they could not make money out of the sale of the recycled waste.

During the television interview, a telephone poll of viewers revealed that 71 per cent supported the Minister’s views.

However, there is a serious problem concerning recycling that I fear the environmentalists are trying to hide. The number of major fires at waste management and recycling plants is causing concern.

In January, the Commissioner of the London Fire Brigade wrote to the Environment Agency asking for its intervention because of the frequency of serious fires at a recycling plant in Orpington. Since 2011, the London Fire Brigade has attended 12 separate serious fires at that one plant, all of which must have drawn heavily on the brigade’s resources, not to mention the risk posed to the fire fighters tackling the fires.

At another recycling plant in Dagenham during the 2012 Olympic Games, the London Fire Brigade had to use 40 pumps to deal with a massive fire and since that blaze, another occurred at the same site in August 2013.

The West Midlands Fire & Rescue Service experienced one of its largest ever fires recently when a Chinese lantern floated into a recycling plant in Birmingham and started a huge blaze.

On January 16, 2014, a fire broke out at Sherburn in North Yorkshire involving 15,000 tonnes of motor tyres at a recycling site.

The fire produced a smoke column that reached 16,000 feet and was visible from space.

The fire is being allowed to burn out but this is likely to take weeks and there will have to be a recovery operation that will also probably take a considerable time.

Wiltshire has not escaped this problem. There have been severe fires in recycling plants very recently. One broke out in Swindon and the other near Devizes.

What is the point of putting so much effort into collecting recyclable material only to create polluting and costly bonfires?