For years the sorting of domestic waste in Germany — colour-coded into blue (for paper), green (grass, plants), black (food leftovers) and yellow (plastic and light metallic alloys) — had to be subsidised heavily. It was a chore even for the most conscientious of householders, a source of constant friction with refuse collectors and expensive.

Curious to find out what happens to my old beer cans, I asked the spokesman for the German recycling company. He rang me back within days and with enthusiasm. “They are compressed with other things and made into park benches!”

I found this quite a good idea and asked him to find out where these park benches were located. In my mind's eye I could see a pensioner feeding the pigeons on my squashed-up and artfully reshaped rubbish.

After a week the spokesman returned the call: “We export them to Russia,” he said. “German park benches require stricter safety standards.” After some more pressure I found out where: Irkutsk! My rubbish was in Siberia.

It took me another two weeks to get a chum in the Russian Embassy to find out how exactly my rubbish was doing. “Mr Boyes,” drawled Alexei, after a fortnight's research, “we have winter all the time out there, nobody sits in parks, only a few madmen.”

The park benches had been taken on sufferance; in all probability the Germans had had to pay the Russians to take them. Still, somewhere out there, in the corner of a warehouse in the tundra, there is my recycled rubbish, sensibly compressed, waiting for the global thaw.

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