Who’s that weirdo? Sadly, the answer is me. I can feel the question following me as I dive into the gutter or duck around the feet of my fellow Londoners to sweep up the bottles and cans and newspapers they have abandoned.

The question hasn’t changed in the the decade or so that I’ve been waging what seems a lone fight against the plastic tide threatening to engulf us. And I doubt it will change now, even as the Guardian reports that a million plastic bottles around the world are bought every minute – that’s a staggering 20,000 every second.

It’s deeply sad that nobody watches my recycling endeavours and thinks: “How weird it is that people casually toss away recyclable waste – indeed any waste – defiling our precious communal spaces with all this litter.”

Nobody watches me and concludes: “Damn it, what an inspiringly sensible fellow. At virtually no cost to himself, sacrificing only a few seconds of the time he spends going from A to B, he makes sure that what other people regard as rubbish can be turned into something useful – at the same time relieving the burden on landfill sites and nurturing the public environment we all share.”

But I’m sure a lot of onlookers observe scathingly: “What a tosser. What’s the point in filling up a few bags with rubbish when the world’s drowning in the stuff? It’s just a drop in the ocean.”

Well, the ocean is where it all started for me. One of those beautiful stretches of surf on the Pembrokeshire coast of Wales. My daughter’s first beach holiday. Her first opportunity to appreciate the wonders of nature, and learn lesson number one: leave the beach just as you find it.

So when at the the end of the day we had to navigate between piles of detritus left by other holidaymakers, I had an epiphany: tut-tutting achieves nothing. Indeed, seeing a problem that you can fix and shrinking from doing so ranks you with the evildoers.

So I said to my daughter: these wild places give so much to us, let’s give something back – only in this case, giving means taking something away. Ten minutes later we had a boot full of rubbish, and half an hour later we had got rid of it all at a recycling centre. Not much effort to make a contribution to the most important battle on the planet: the battle to save the planet

I once tried to work out how many plastic and glass bottles and cans I have shifted since then. Obviously the mood varies: some days I’m a recycling superhero, on others the sheer scale of the task rips the spirit out of you. But one thing that never slackens is the supply of rubbish – I would say I rarely collect fewer than 50 items a day.

Indeed, 50 is a piece of cake. Next time you plod to work from the station, or stroll to the shops, look down at the pavement and into the gutters, look up at the wall-tops. Every few paces, you will see another Evian bottle, energy drink, lager can, free paper.

So a rough – and extremely conservative – calculation makes that 180,000 items over 10 years; 180,000 bottles and cans and papers saved from landfill and sent to recycling by me – one person acting all on his lonesome. And don’t forget, all those 180,000 times I’ve stooped to clear up the results of someone else’s thoughtlessness, I’ve never once let my halo slip.

A futile gesture? Perhaps. But sometimes futile gestures are the only ones we have. And just imagine if even a small percentage of the millions of people in this country, the billions around the world, decided that other people thinking us weird was a small sacrifice to make when the world is facing the greatest peril in human history. Are we really too cool to make a stand against global warming?