I can say “like everyone else” because this year my local council has gone for the recycling thing, in a big way – separate bins for different materials, carefully labelled in exactly the place that you can’t read if you arrive with armfuls of junk. I can see people wandering up to the recycling pen, and hear the discussions about which bin should receive which piece of trash.

Lately the council have responded to pressure and delivered a little dumpster, fractionally less smelly than the others, labelled “small electricals”, since this category evidently produced the highest levels of recycling confusion: “well, it’s plastic on the case, but there’s some metal on the inside…”

It has taken four pick-ups before this latest innovation contained anything other than “home user” inkjet printers. I think this is one of the great hidden crimes of our industry – I strongly doubt there’s one printer in those four dumpster-loads which is more than five years old. I’m not entirely sure how many households this dumpster is serving – it could be as high as 3,000 flats -  but four dumpster-loads of printers is (at a guess) maybe 80 units.

By contrast, I’ve been getting a client sorted out with some bigger printers. Not because they print a lot, but more because it’s too much hassle to set up four different types of printer driver across 12 machines and then battle with the irritating tricks that bottom-end printers can pull on you when you try to share them. So I ordered these guys four Xerox Phaser 8400 printers – monster corporate full-colour machines that print by melting solid wax blocks for a very classy middle-resolution finish, which is ideal so long as your printed output isn’t on shiny labels or subject to lots of flexing (the wax “ink” can crack off the paper).

These are, on first sight, the antithesis of a “green” printer. They have to be left powered on, in a background heater mode, or else they consume about 20% of a wax stick in an arcane nozzle-cleaning mode. On the other hand, all that heavy metal and wax-handling technology is refurbishable. Parts are swappable between the four machines, so users can print to a working unit while the refurbishment is under way.

I realise that having four ex-corporate networked paper mills is hardly a usable solution if you only want 10 pages a week (or even a month), but perhaps the Lesson of the Dumpster is that it’s easier to be green the larger scale you get. In a move which I am hoping to see many more companies follow this year, my client has said that any member of staff can print personal documents on their pool of big refurbished printers, with “honesty boxes” left by the printers for them to drop some change into: a much better “green” approach, than investing in a personal printer with a short life-cycle.

My esteemed editor recently handed me the Nokia E71 he’d been testing. Because he’s a stickler for reviewing kit properly, it was stuffed full of his personal data, including his Exchange email, text messages and contacts.

Once I’d sent an email to our publisher with Tim’s recommendation of a huge pay rise for the hard-working, irreplaceable, online editor, I set about trying to wipe the data.  First, I formatted the memory card, but it seems all Tim’s personal files were stored on the phone’s internal memory and, oddly, there was no obvious way to format that.

So I dug out the manual and hard reset the phone to factory settings, but incredibly that wasn’t enough to shift the data either.   Which means either Nokia is pre-installing the personal data of PC Pro staff on all of its handsets or the hard reset is about as hard as The Sun crossword.

In the end, I resorted to deleting the data manually from each of the relevant folders. And it seems I’m not the only one who has trouble scrubbing data from Nokia devices. “It has taken us over a year to get talks going with Nokia that now allows us to wipe their phones,” said John Godfrey, from mobile recycling service, Sims Lifecycle Services, talking to The Guardian.  “To wipe it, you have to be able to access all the memory – and manufacturers don’t want you to do that for all sorts of commercial reasons.”

That’s plainly not good enough. Mobile phones are probably more recycle-worthy than any other gadget, because the networks tempt customers to upgrade long before the phone ceases functioning. But there’s no way consumers, and especially businesses, will send their phones to be reused if there’s any chance their sensitive data will go with it. Even my manual delete wouldn’t prevent a determined hacker from retrieving infromation from the phone’s memory. 

Instead of adding barcode readers, novelty wallpapers or all manner of other useless gubbins on our handsets, the phone makers should be working on a simple way to erase user data. It can’t be that difficult – Windows does it without even trying!