For those interested in the smallest scale of granularity of engineering social change which is emaginable, our Officer responsible for the Development of our University's Sustainability Plan has made a Modest Proposal that staff bins, waste paper baskets, what one calls them, be removed.

Instead there will be recycling centres in buildings to which materials will be taken.

When it was announced at a steering group for sustainability meeting, I threw my toys out of my pram.

Apart from negotiation, consultation, and participation, and the role of the union, this seems to me a case in point of the nature of the sustainable development argument, that it is a device for keeping the rich comfortable in seclusion with a guilt nappy, place extra work, unpaid, on their victims, and if possible, increase the victim's sense of self blame.  Sustainable apartheid in a phrase.  Capital and class in a knutshell.

Now I might be wrong on at least five counts:

I might have misunderstood her proposal, in which case admitting this allows her to change her proposal.

It might be that her strategy, simply do it, is right, and mine, consult, decide, participate, is wrong.

The membership of the university might be secretlly crying out for such leadership and will welcome the proposal, and I am wrong to suggest, like taking away their car parking spaces, they are looking for the opportunity to give up evil.

My strategy not only wont work, but is actually a device for ensuring that change doesn't happen.

The matter is so trivial, no one could understand why I even bother to make a message of it.

And that might be enough.

The battle of the -binz probably wont appear in accounts of the 21st century.

The cleaners however might lose their jobs as their work has been externalised, so they too wont have an impression of sustainable development to tell their children, and it might just be that cost reduction is what gives this management buyin?