SPRING is coming to roadside verges. The rains of the winter have washed flat all of last summer’s growth and so it is now easy to spot the snowy drifts of snowdrops taking hold, their white bells jangling as the lorries blow by, and the first of the daffodils plumping up, their green buds swelling by the day.

Yesterday morning, on my drive in to work, I stopped on a bend of the A167 on the southern edge of Darlington to see what the bulbs were competing with. It’s a very average verge. It doesn’t look any more litter strewn than any other section, although there is a little layby where drivers stop and sandwich.

In a 20 yard section, blown up against the hedgerow, I noted four flattened drinks cups from Greggs, KFC, Costa and McCafe; there were five squashed cans of lager, cider and coke; there were three glass bottles which had once held milk, white wine and Mythos Hellenic beer, and there were countless – truly countless – plastic bottles.

There was a purple Fruit Shoot, a Ribena, two flavours of Frijj milkshake, two flavours of Volvic water, a Drench pear and blueberry water, a Vimto fizzy cherry, a Yazoo banana smoothie, a Lucozade, a one litre EuroShopper Original Energy Drink, a five litre Halfords screenwash and an all-in-one extraction cleaner for colourfast carpets.

You would be in trouble if you had consumed the last two, and I wondered if the large EuroShopper drink, costing only £1, would be just as efficacious on the carpets as the extraction cleaner.

There were more plastic shapes lurking in the hedgerow, but I felt the first drops of rain on my head.

These shapes had been twisted and contorted by their collisions with the heaviest, fastest vehicles on our roads, but they were still obviously bottles. They are practically indestructible – it takes at least 450 years for them to degrade.

And they are the tip of a plastic iceberg. Every day in Britain, we use about 35m plastic bottles. We recycle 56 per cent of them, and we dump about 16m. Most go to landfill; some fly out of car windows on the A167, blow to the Skerne a few hundred yards away, sail down the Tees and end in the seas. Of the 300m tons of plastic produced globally every year, ten per cent winds up in the ocean, and so by 2050, there will be more plastic than fish in the sea.

This week, despite the laudable efforts of the Daily Mail, the Government has let it be known that it is unlikely to introduce a 10p or 20p charge on each plastic bottle. This would have made them returnable like glass bottles used to be - you’d take your plastics to a “reverse vending machine” in a supermarket which would give you your money, or a voucher, in return.

The drinks industry is against the charge. It says it would penalise the majority – the 56 per cent – who currently recycle, and it asks why we’d want to create a second, expensive recycling infrastructure when everyone already has a free kerbside council system they could use if they weren’t so lazy.

But the charge, which is used in Sweden, Belgium and north America, does work. Germany introduced a 22p levy per bottle in 2003, and recycling shot up to 98 per cent. In October 2015, we placed a 5p tax on plastic bags and usage dropped by 85 per cent.

And we need it – just ask the bulbs on the A167 trying to push their pretty heads past the Volvic and EuroShopper plastic.