You’ll know the feeling: it’s that moment when a large, bulky item – perhaps a plastic children’s sit-on tricycle or a degenerating Ikea bedroom unit – leaves your fingers after months, years of being tolerated.

Despite the stink, there's no denying the unsurpassed elation that a trip to the tip can induce — a rare sublimity that some people pay thousands to achieve through exotic spa treatments in the Alps, or by snorkelling in crystalline waters with banjo-playing Buddhist monks in Borneo.

As the detested tricycle or Ikea unit crashes down behind you, you are transported. You stride back to your car, a taller, happier homo sapiens, one that commands all the suburbia he surveys. You slap your hands together – you remember the A-Team, don’t you – and reach from the boot of your car for the next sacrificial offering to the great mortuary temple of consumerism.

We are my friends, a society addicted two things: shopping – and then throwing away that shopping.

And the ying and the yang of our imperfect world is writ large at the municipal tip – a place some of us go to so frequently that it’s fast becoming a national pastime. Sure, it’s not as collegiate as a game of cricket on the green, nor as good for the pulse as a set of tennis, but it is – as anyone who’s sat in a queue of traffic outside their local ‘recycling’ centre – clearly one of our favourite recreational activities.

Each year British households generate 26 million tonnes of waste, of which a mighty 46 per cent is recycled, according to the government. That’s about 400 kilos of waste per household. While much of that is collected from the doorstep there’s a healthy chunk that comes from the regular trips people take to their local tip, which makes it a somewhat guilty pleasure – one that we're not afraid of pushing to the extremes.

How much, first of all, can one really fit in the average family saloon? Is it OK by the Highway Code to tie to the boot shut with string, if you use a lot of it?

The urge to fill the car to overflowing is understandable; such is the demand for trips to the tip that in some areas the queues have been so forbidding councils have erected cameras so that would-be ‘dumpees’ can check before they leave on the queuing situation. Where I live you are banned from waiting outside the entrance prior to opening hours.

Then there’s the great game of all – how much you can smuggle into the container marked ‘general waste’ without being caught by the staff?

Do you, like escapees from Stalag Luft III, wait for the beak in the fluorescent bib to be distracted by the someone carrying the drum kit or obviously toxic waste to the wrong container, before you attempt to offload the next batch of illicit building materials? How many tins of half-used paint can you realistically conceal within one cardboard box? Is it feasible to smuggle the remnants of an old loo into black bin bags and slip it into the container undetected? What about old roof tiles?

Perhaps you’re cut from a different cloth, and you’re one of those tip users who takes fastidious pleasure in ordering your waste items in advance so that they can be deposited optimistically for recycling, rather going to landfill in, say, Turkmenistan?

Admit it, who doesn’t get a buzz from recycling those batteries, printer cartridges and lightbulbs in precisely the right plastic tubs? I know I do. We’re saving the planet here, one AAA battery at a time.

And that’s the joy of the tip: it never loses its allure. When we moved house last year I ended up going to the tip fully eight times. I haven’t been that contented for a sustained period since my honeymoon. And I know I’m not alone because the tip comes up more often in conversation than you might imagine – typically, though not exclusively, among men.

The other day a solicitor I know spoke animatedly, and at length, about the delights of removing hundreds of pieces of glass illicitly buried in his garden by a previous owner, and taking it all to the dump. Gruelling but satisfying.

We can't escape the urge to purge. It's become one of the things we do. Rising property prices force many of us to live in smaller homes, and yet we fill them with an ever more fantastical array of next-day-delivery goods. A trip to the tip brings some catharsis to the conundrum, and perhaps a semblance of control.

Like it or not, it’s where you’ll probably be next Saturday, or the Saturday after. See you there.

Alec Marsh is editor-at-large at Spear's magazine and is the author of Rule Britannia and Enemy of the Raj.