What it means:It could be a neighbour or a friend, or even a member of your family. You won't realise until it's too late, and you're trapped with no means of escape. You're just about to clear away your dinner things when they strike without warning. Their pleasant demeanour disappears, and they adopt the gimlet glare of a hungry crocodile. "You're not putting those leftover vegetables in the black bin, are you? Here's today's Irish Times – wrap them in that, and put them in the brown bin. Or do you want to destroy the world?" You've just found out that the person you married is a recyclopath, so obsessed with recycling everything in their lives, they've gone quite mad. If you so much as put a soggy serviette in the black bin, they'll be all over you like a wet blanket.
Where it comes from: Just when did reasonable, sane people start turning into complete environ-mentalists? Blame Al Gore's climate-change horror movie An Inconvenient Truth, or blame the local council, which seems to add a new colour to its range of bins every week, piling the guilt on top of our garbage. Whoever's to blame, nowhere is safe: the earth is now overrun by recylopaths, shuffling around like marauding zombies, and moaning their mantra of "reduuuce . . . reuuuse . . . recyyycle . . ."
How to say it:"Mom's such a recylopath – she made Santa put his cake crumbs in the composter and clean up after Rudolf, then gave out yards to him about all the packaging on his presents."
