I have discovered waste separation. This is bad news for the household. Yesterday I found two empty jars in the dustbin and I freaked. “Who threw these in the bin?” I yelled. “How can you be so irresponsible? Why didn’t you put these glass jars in the basket under the kitchen table, with all the other glass?” I behaved as though I had caught them red-handed, setting truck tyres alight with a jerry-can of petrol. Now they feel that nothing is safe, because I whiz through the house like that American woman on the BBC Prime show, who forces her victims to throw their stuff away whether they want to or not.

I was hugely unpopular for a while because I spirited away a tangle of dusty wiring and cables that I classed as ‘rubbish’, but which turned out to be Very Important Network Wiring. Some weeks later, the owner of this wiring, with parts of a dismantled computer lying around him on the carpet, wanted to know why it was no longer in his bedroom. “You threw it away,” he said, accusingly. “I bet you did.” I pretended not to know anything about it, but eventually, I was rumbled. After all, where else could it have gone? Could the dogs have eaten it? No. I am now the resident burn-or-recycle menace, my new passion for recycling having only exacerbated my horror of hoarding. My least favourite adage is ‘waste not, want not’. It is the root cause of so many cupboards found stuffed with bits of string and empty margarine tubs when people die and the relatives move in to clean up. You can always buy a ball of string when you need one.

Every week, I drive down to the waste separation bins behind Mosta dome, and smugly slot my plastic, paper and metal into their mouths. When I am done, I half expect somebody to come up to me, pat me on the head (difficult, when I am in heels) and say, “Good girl! I’ll put a gold star against your name.” I smash the glass, which is very rewarding – but get this, I wash the jars and soak off the labels before I cast them into waste separation limbo. I know there’s a phrase for it, but I feel better that way, like those people who wake up in the middle of the night because they’ve hung their brown shirt with the blue ones.

But sometimes, I’m in a little bit of a rush and things go wrong. Last week, I tossed the newspapers into the gaping bin-mouth only to realise, when I climbed back into the car, that I had also thrown away my cuttings, my notes, and that day’s editions, plus the new Vogue. When I reported this fact back at base, the response was one of smirking satisfaction. “Now you know what it feels like,” they said, “and what’s even better is that you’ve done it to yourself.”

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I don’t think I have ever given a push to any business through this column. It wouldn’t be correct. In this case, though, I have to make an exception. This is one business that deserves all the exposure and assistance it can get – and the people who run the service didn’t ask me for help; they don’t know anything about it. I’m talking about Cartridge World in San Gwann. You take your empty printer ink cartridge there, and they’ll refill it while you wait. If they have a compatible ready-refilled cartridge packed and waiting, they’ll give you that one. It costs much, much less than buying a new cartridge, and that’s an important consideration for business and home use. But equally important is the civic consideration: by reusing the same cartridge you are not adding to the mountain of rubbish nor to the dioxin levels when all your used cartridges are burnt, as they eventually will be. I paid Lm19 for my recycled cartridge instead of the usual Lm36 for a new one, yet what pleased me most was the relief at not having to throw my empty cartridges into the bin, something that has been bothering me for years. I used to look at the recycling information on the package – all of it geared at other European countries – heave a sigh, and chuck them away. So, if you handle the office supplies for your company, check out Cartridge World and cut down on your operation’s contribution to the rubbish mountain – while drastically slashing your costs. Even if you don’t care about the environmental aspect of this service, getting your printer cartridges for a fraction of the usual cost has to be attractive, unless you enjoy flushing money down the drain. Those who sell new cartridges are going to hate me for this, but what can I say? They had better start a refilling service of their own, because that’s the way we’re heading.

I saw a photograph of the Environment Minister paying a visit to Cartridge World the other day. That was a good gesture, but I hope he now goes a step much further, and persuades his colleagues to make the use of recycled cartridges compulsory in all ministries and government departments. That’s called putting your money where your mouth is, and leading by example. And those who control finances will be pleased, because they’re a whole lot cheaper.

Do they work? I hear you ask. Does the ink smudge? Will a refilled cartridge adversely affect my printer? The answers are yes, no, and no again. There’s one in my printer right now, and I’m using it.

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Now I am left with my annoyance about those huge plastic bottles in which fabric conditioner is sold. “What for do you buy fabric conditioner, anyway?” my sister snaps, when I grumble about all that pointless plastic. “Do you go around fondling your socks?” Well, what can I say? It’s the housewife in me – but I am sorely tempted to stop that weekly purchase because I know that much of the cost goes to cover the manufacture of the bottle, and then I have to cope with anxieties over my environmental irresponsibility in contributing 52 of those bottles every year to the rubbish dump. I used to burn them, feeling very pleased with myself, until three others began to yell at me about dioxins (there’s a lot of yelling in our household, you will have gathered) and give graphic descriptions of the consequences. That’s what happens when you give your kids an education – they end up knowing more than you do, and ticking you off for bad behaviour, instead of the other way round.

I haven’t quite come round to striking fabric conditioner off the shopping list – even though I don’t fondle socks – but I have found a halfway-there solution, a bit like nicotine pads for an addiction to clothes-softening: concentrated fabric conditioner. This comes in very small bottles made of far less durable plastic, so I don’t feel so bad about it.

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I’ve bought some of those cloth shopping bags, too, and when the girl at the till offers me a plastic carrier bag, I wave my hand virtuously and try to cram my goods into these. Then I resort to cardboard boxes, and by the time I’m finished, I need a retinue of porters to help me out – but I’m left to struggle alone. The bags, of course, have only served as yet another source of trouble, as in “Who touched my bags? For heaven’s sake, can’t anyone leave things where they find them?” To which the answer inevitably is: “At least we don’t throw them away or burn them.” Fortunately, I have not yet sunk to the level where I wash them in fabric conditioner.

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Is there a conspiracy afoot to make life as uncomfortable as possible, to make people feel colder and poorer and more miserable? First they double the price of paraffin overnight (tripling it over two years) and make that form of heating unaffordable by most. Then, when people are forced to switch to the lumbering inconvenience of gas-cylinder heaters, the distribution is severely disrupted and there’s no supply for three weeks.

Last Saturday, I drove past the gas depot – such as it is, a parked truck outside the disused Price Club supermarket – in Burmarrad, and saw a crowd of about 100 people, standing around waiting for cylinders. It was chaos, made worse by the fact that you can’t get a new cylinder unless you hand in an empty one, so the Maltese-style queue was not made up only of people, but also of empty cylinders. As several angry Mosta residents told me in the street, it’s all very well (and to be frank, it’s not) if you have a car and the time to drive to Burmarrad, and the strength to heave cylinders in and out of the boot and into the house. But what if you don’t? What if you’re a little old lady or a little old man, or a pregnant woman or somebody who goes everywhere by bus? Then, you freeze, and you eat stuff out of tins, that doesn’t need cooking. Or you beg relatives for assistance. As people raised on prolonged water-cuts and black-outs, we’re used to this kind of hardship, but this far down the line, it’s ridiculous. It’s not even acceptable to have to drive around hunting for gas cylinders, still less to do without them because there’s a chink in the supply chain.

The government needs us to use gas, because if we all switched to electricity for cooking and heating, we would spend most of our lives in the dark and the cold, eating out of those tins, as the power supply will not be able to meet demand.

Of course, the misery engendered by the unaffordable price of paraffin and the unavailability of gas cylinders is compounded by the excessive cold and the perceived need to penny-pinch as insecurity grows. This kind of running around after heating only serves to wake us up to the fact that our standard of living really isn’t that high, after all, and that far from being spoiled, we accept very low standards as our lot in life. We don’t expect better, still less demand it.

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On the coldest day in 24 years, I went to a supermarket that has no automatic doors. Its entrance was wide open to the chill, and the girls at the tills were sitting in the full blast of the seven-degree chill. They were wearing scarves, but no jackets, over their uniform, and their frozen fingers were fumbling over the buttons, even the one who was wearing fingerless gloves. I was so angry on their behalf that I told them in a very loud voice they shouldn’t accept to work in those conditions – just as we shouldn’t be shopping in them, but we were free not to do so. I was going straight to the office to protest on their behalf, but they stopped me. They would rather have the sort of job where you sit in the icy cold all day than no job at all. “It’s not a choice between the two,” I wanted to tell them. “That’s why we have labour laws, and that’s why unions were first set up.” It hadn’t even occurred to them that there was something wrong, that they had the right to ask for the doors to be kept closed or automatic doors installed; that no one should be expected to work at a cash-till in temperatures of seven degrees.

But as far as they were concerned, it was a freezing day and they were cold, full-stop – that’s the way things were. I was reminded of what an elderly woman had told me when I asked her, really curious to know, how on earth she had accepted without question the fact that she was not allowed the vote in elections, because that right was reserved exclusively for men. “It’s the way things were,” she said. “We never really thought about it.” I persisted: “Didn’t you realise the implications? How could you just accept it?” If it had been me, I would have been simmering away with rage. I suppose if you’re raised not to think, then you don’t think.

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And that’s why we have such atrocious roads, a poor gas distribution system and impractical alternatives to gas, and employers who leave their shop-girls to sit all day in freezing doorways. We take everything lying down, we don’t even realise that it’s not acceptable to be expected to put up with certain things – and then, if we do realise, instead of speaking up and doing something about it, we wait for the chance to get our revenge in secret. It speaks volumes that in Malta the vote had to be practically foisted on women, because most of them never even asked for it.