IS the reaction to Lancashire's growing mountain of rubbish determined enough?

For, although the joint strategy by all its local authorities has targets that are due to be under way by 2005 and will be reviewed every five years, is not a more urgent response than its overall 20-year span called for?

After all, Lancashire is generating a staggering 700,000 tons of household refuse a year. And the amount has been growing at a rate of eight per cent a year over the past six years.

Furthermore, this is despite the introduction by the government in the interim of the 'eco' landfill tax that was aimed largely at councils, as they are among the country's biggest dumpers, and was seen as an incentive for boosting recycling. But almost four years on, the main effect seems to be just that the landfill bill has been passed on to council tax payers while Lancashire's rubbish mountain only gets bigger. And all of it is still going into landfill sites that gobble millions of pounds of public money, blight the landscape and generate global-warming greenhouse gasses.

The new strategy aims to have nine out of ten homes recycling their refuse and two million trees planted in order to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

But should not the recycling targets and time-scales be stepped up now to at least match and, better still, outstrip that annual eight per cent increase in the country's rubbish? Is it really too ambitious to kick-start the bid for 90 per cent recycling in Lancashire homes 20 years from now by aiming to have just one in 12 doing it by next year?

One approach must be much greater education. But if greater recycling is to be achieved, incentives are needed -- perhaps of a carrot-and-stick kind.

Above all, however, recycling must be encouraged by access -- if people are to stop putting items in their bins that can be re-used then they must have somewhere else to put them. And that demands that councils make recycling points far more widespread.

We are simply not green enough.