Working in a newspaper office, there is, inevitably, a fair amount of paper around, most of which lies idle on my desk in what I claim to be a filing system.

But when opening the post the other day, I noticed the speed at which I was accumulating excess paper and used envelopes.

And as I sat, staring at this pile of rubbish, (which bears no relation to my articles or blogs before anyone jokes) it became apparent to me that it could be too easy to flout the recycling responsibilities.

The green drive seems to be steering in the right direction across households in Barnet.

It appears a large group of residents have got their act in gear to reduce their level of carbon emissions when travelling around the borough.

Those exhausted of churning out thousands of tonnes of CO2 have given their own cars the boot in favour of a shared alternative.

For me, staying in on Saturday nights usually consists of generic family TV viewing and wholly unhealthy eating.

Neither of which offer much satisfaction nor benefit the environment in anyway.

However, this weekend, my lonely night in could turn into a massive multi-million person protest to raise awareness of environmental issues, which is slightly more inspiring than Casualty.

Women often complain about how difficult they find it to get their bloke to go out shopping for new clothes.

But according to new research, that’s not where the issue with men and fashion ends.

In fact, after hard fought battles to get clothes into the wardrobe, men now apparently struggle to throw them out in an environmentally helpful way.

There always seems to be at least two things I forget when I go shopping.

One is usually the most obvious item and actually the thing I went to get, probably bread or milk.

The other thing though, often seems to be plastic bags, I always forget to take my own plastic bags, it's shocking I admit.

Most of us prefer to do things if we can get something out of it personally.

That’s not to say we’re selfish, just that it is nice to get a reward or some direct benefit from carrying out an activity.

So all this environmental, recycling stuff often seems distant, because some people don’t see the tangible positives that come from putting a can in a black box.

However, us Barnet residents could see the benefit in the form of a small financial saving, something in the region of £11 million!