OUR street is awash with rubbish. There are green bins, black bins, blue bags, green boxes, black boxes and lots of soggy spillovers standing by doorways and piling up in front of windows. Storms Dylan and Eleanor have lashed through, lifting lids and redistributing contents, but we’ve collected it all back up and piled it higher than ever.

The refuse collectors were supposed to come on a different day during Christmas week, but somehow everyone in the street missed them. The proliferation of bank holidays over the festive period means that many people don’t know what day it is, but the whole street doesn’t know what week it is, whether we’re recycling with boxes and bags or sending to landfill with the big black bin.

So we’ve put the whole lot out while more bottles and plastics and paper piles up behind the closed doors.

It’s been so long since our corner of North Yorkshire got a collection that we’re getting twitchy. Just the sound of a heavy lorry approaching the street sparks a wildfire rumour that the binmen are coming. People jump from their breakfast tables in their pyjamas, the sick even leap from their deathbeds, and everyone runs about with dressing gowns flapping trying to make sure their pile of rubbish does not get overlooked.

So far, they’ve all been false rumours. Our rubbish remains, the packaging lasting longer than the biscuits and the chocolates and the interest in some of the toys.

Some people clearly haven’t bothered to wait. On the A66 around Darlington on Boxing Day I was amazed to see the bins in the laybys overflowing with discarded wrapping paper. There were even a couple of large sparkly Santa bags with the debris of someone’s Christmas spilling out onto the roadside.

Our plastics box is now rammed full, with everything from chocolate orange housing to a dolls’ house furniture display to empty fruit trays. We requested none of this plastic. Indeed, as the purchaser, I was not asked whether I wanted my tomatoes with plastic or without – the supermarket just packaged them up in a plastic carton wrapped up in see-through plastic because it was most convenient for the supermarket.

But on New Year’s Day, China said it was no longer going to accept “yang laji”, or “foreign garbage”. Since 2012, China has been recycling about two-thirds of our plastic waste – about 500,000 tonnes a year. We’ve sent them 2.7m tonnes in five years, and I suspect at least some of it hasn’t been recycled as we would understand it – turned into a new product – but it has been incinerated to generate electricity to feed China’s industry.

It is staggering: the dolls’ house furniture that my son received for Christmas (don’t ask) was made in China. It was shipped halfway round the world wrapped in unwanted plastic which he threw away in a second and was then meant to be slowboated back round the globe for recycling where it had begun. This 12,000-mile madness might have prevented the plastic going to landfill in Britain, but a dirty ship chugging smokily across the planet cannot have made for an environmentally-friendly journey.

Even more staggering, I agree with Environment Secretary Michael Gove who has said Britain needs to “stop off-shoring its dirt”.

A quarter of councils across the country do not collect plastics from the doorstep, but most in this area seem to do so – my own, Richmondshire, introduced a good, comprehensive collection a year ago, although it couldn’t tell me yesterday where my own plastic waste was destined.

Durham collected 6,030.64 tonnes of plastic from its kerbsides in the year 2016-17 which went to be sorted in Washington (Tyne and Wear, not the US) and then “sent on to a range of appropriate markets for reprocessing in to a range of products from plastic pellets through to fleece clothing”. Darlington – obviously with much fewer doorsteps than Durham – recycles about 590 tonnes of plastic a year which goes to a plant in Leicester for reprocessing.

Because China has taken the bulk of Britain’s plastic, we haven’t bothered to develop a large enough recycling industry to take all our homegrown waste. It is now destined to be either incinerated, which will release carbon into the atmosphere and leave behind a residue of chemicals and heavy metals, or buried in landfill. As plastic is generally inert, it doesn’t decay when buried and pollute the groundwater – although it may leech some toxins – but it does take up a lot of space, and one day in one century in the future, it will be rediscovered, if it hasn’t already been washed out into the sea.

And, inspired by David Attenborough’s Blue Planet II series, plastic pollution of the oceans is the hottest topic on the planet at the moment.

China’s new policy presents us with problems, but also opportunities – Teesside has long campaigned for support for its fledgling carbon capture and storage industry; perhaps plastic recycling is more viable.

But we all need a nudge in the right direction.

And nudges do work – the 5p carrier bag tax introduced two years ago has cut our usage by 85 per cent and has prevented the creation of 9bn bags which would only have ended up clogging up landfill and the digestive tracts of whichever poor animals tried to eat them.

So why isn’t there a deposit on plastic bottles to prevent them from being jammed into overflowing bins on the A66 after a single use? Why aren’t the supermarkets being charged 5p every time they put tomatoes or grapes in a plastic punnet?

We need some nudges now otherwise the whole nation will be drowning in a sea of rubbish – just like my street.