COULD you find everything you need to live on in the next three weeks from the council's municipal dump?

Everything from shelter, bedding, entertainment to - gulp - food?

Ten brave souls are about to find out. They've agreed to take part in the new Channel 4 show Dumped: Your Home Is A Tip, which starts filming later this year and involves them living on one of the country's largest landfill sites.

Channel 4 boss Kevin Lygo says the show has a serious point. And that is to point out just how much useable stuff we chuck out every year.

"They will have to feed, clothe and heat themselves," he says. "It's a way of analysing issues of how we live, what we throw away and how wasteful we are."

And we ARE wasteful. A couple of years ago I spent a day working as a dustman with Bournemouth Borough Council's excellent refuse collection department. I was put on the posh' round, collecting rubbish from upmarket Talbot Woods and I was astonished at what people throw away.

Sheets, books, pots of flowers with the flowers still blooming, china. In one wheelie bin I discovered four perfect pink cushions, neatly piled up. In another there were clothes, folded and placed in the bin.

The dusties I worked with recalled finding radios that worked, packets of unopened food and a person who disposed of a car engine, bit by bit each week. And they were saddened by it.

"We really wish people would recycle more," they said.

During the day I discovered where it all ends up - at a giant and exceedingly smelly municipal landfill site. Dustmen don't get a tea-break and so I was obliged to eat my bacon buttie in the cab, as the cart skidded over thousands of tonnes of waste. I had to break the habit of a lifetime and throw the wrapper out of the window because, as one of them told me: "Where do you think it all ends up?"

As a thousand seagulls circled over the dump I noticed everything from old food waste to bags of unwanted toys and several mattress mountains. It was a sobering and depressing sight.

On the Swedish version of Dumped, contestants found a fully-working TV to amuse them during their Stig-of-the-Dump stint. And I can easily imagine the British contingent being able to cover the entertainment and shelter end of things.

But food? Could you really find food you could eat on a dump? Well, a survey by the electric company Braun discovered that YUBBIES (Young Urban Bin Baggers) waste £865 million of food every year by letting it go stale or out of date. One in six people wastes more than 10 per cent of their average £42 weekly groceries shopping. Salad and fresh vegetables are the most likely items to be thrown away and keeping leftover food in the fridge, like our mums did, is so over.

The government's Recycle Now unit says that for every five tons of electrical products thrown away by consumers it is estimated that another 15 tons are wasted in making the products.

No wonder we're all discarding an estimated one tonne of waste annually, chucking away our own bodyweight in rubbish every seven weeks and every eight months we produce enough junk to fill Lake Windermere. Every two hours, even, we produce enough rubbish to fill the Albert Hall.

Every year, according to Recycle Now, the average dustbin contains enough unrealised energy for 500 baths, 3500 showers or 5,000 hours of television.

How appropriate then, that we'll be reminded of these facts by people forced to live where all this ends up. And not a moment too soon.