EVERY time you tie up a black bag full of rubbish for the weekly collection, a little elf should sit at your ear pleading that you rethink the way you live.

They should ask that you look at each and every object being discarded, to be buried in some unseen hole in the ground, to check that it is truly deserving of such an expensive burial.

Expensive because the thousands of tonnes removed from all of our homes and businesses each year continues to increase, despite innumerable calls for us to change our throwaway habits. In Worcestershire, we create enough rubbish to fill a 23-storey building the size of a football pitch each year. It would top 30 stories if Herefordshire's rubbish were thrown in.

Leading calls to deal with this problem, as part of a national campaign to sort out the way we discard our rubbish, is Malvern-based sustainability charity Welcome to Our Future. It says that if we can reduce the amount we dump at landfill sites we will cut our Council Tax and protect the environment.

The Rethink Rubbish campaign is not about blaming us as individuals, but about stressing that it is time everyone took responsibility. With the amount of rubbish continuing to increase at a rate of three per cent a year, the predictions are that by 2020 our waste will have doubled.

Therefore, the campaign asks that while supermarkets do their bit by rethinking packaging strategies, we divide aluminium cans from plastic bottles, foodstuff from glass, paper from textiles and take them for recycling.

Unfortunately, for those living in the Malvern Hills district, recycling is not made as easy as it is in other areas, where councils provide each household with recycling bins and organise special collections.

Being rural counties, such collections in Worcestershire and Herefordshire would be problematic because the long distances between collections mean high costs.

Difficulties also exist because Malvern Hills District Council is responsible for domestic rubbish collections, while Worcestershire County Council is the waste disposal authority.

However, targets have been set to increase the present eight per cent of rubbish being recycled to 10 per cent by 2003/4 and to 18 per cent by 2005/6. To achieve this, kerbside collections of 'recyclables' in urban areas in the Malvern Hills are set to be introduced and, for the other half of the population, access to recycling facilities improved.

Ideas for the long-term future are to create a separation plant so that people can put out all their rubbish in one bag, as at present, and it will be automatically streamed into recycling categories.

"One way or another we have got to meet these standards," said Malvern Hills District Council's client services manager Paul Sobczyk.

Welcome to Our Future campaign manager Sue Fyleman said: "We really need to break the habit by starting to recycle as much as we can. For example, if everyone decided to compost their kitchen organic rubbish, such as fruit and vegetable peelings and teabags, we would reduce the amount of rubbish going to the Hill and Moor landfill site, near Pershore, by about one third overnight and we would be turning our organic kitchen rubbish into earthy riches for use on our gardens.

"If we don't achieve this we'll be heavily penalised by Europe. This is the biggest campaign ever and it is great that all the retailers are signing up for it. It is very exciting."

The campaign will include community networking, adverts, posters and radio roadshows and is being taken on up Tesco, Asda, Safeway, Sainsbury's, Waitrose, Halfords, B&Q, Boots, Budgeons, Co-op and Focus Wickes Ltd.

For more about Welcome to Our Future, call 01684 862281 or email wtof.campaign@ukonline.co.uk.