Any old iron? The plaintive Steptoe cry has echoed through Britain's streets for generations. Give us your tired bedsprings, your poor plumbing, the wretched refuse of your teeming homes, and, for a few coppers, the cart will take them away to be smelted. Nowadays the local council Steptoes are calling out for more than iron: newspapers, cardboard, plastic pots, wine bottles, jars, tins, old shoes, spare socks and polyurethane. All the detritus of affluence that was once thrown down mines, buried in quarries or piled high on landfill sites is in demand as never before.

Rubbish has been upgraded to recyclables and now commands far more than those few coppers. With today's oil price, even plastics are shooting up in value. Yoghurt pots and ice-cream containers will soon be worth more than the food they contain. A decade ago Britain sent its waste to India or China, where the poor picked a living from the garbage. Now that is done on an industrial scale at home. Plastic reprocessing capacity has leapt from 30,000 tonnes in 2006 to 150,000 tonnes this year, rising soon to 250,000 tonnes. Glass, paper and tin cans are equally valuable.

Never has the adage of brass and muck been truer. Indeed, in America they will soon start burrowing into ancient landfill mountains to retrieve what a throwaway society once squandered. Decay here has been faster, yielding useful supplies of methane. But resifting the rubbish has been slower. The market, meanwhile, is working its own miracles. Fly-tipping may be a thing of the past. Beer cans will be scavanged from the streets. Keeping Britain tidy will be profitable as well as ethical. Commodity price rises have a silver lining - recyclable, of course.