A particulate problem

Sir, – Having watched a number of recent TV programmes concerning the persistent plastic pollution of the oceans and elsewhere, I am now evidently an inhabitant of “Waste World”.

This has not happened overnight, yet only now has recycling become the watch word of the century.

Bad-for-the-biosphere man – the one who uses the mad wrapper, that even covers plastic with plastic, and then buries it, or dumps it in the seas – must think, somehow, that that is the end of it.

Should any future intelligent life on this planet discover our fossilised remains they will be covered in eternal indestructible plastic.

They may even wonder if plastic was part of our morphology.

Yet, the most insidious plastic waste is not that which we see bobbing on the oceans, but its particulate permeation into all forms of living

tissue. That should cause the greatest concern.

As with global warming, is this sudden concern too little too late to avoid disaster?

If you are reading this whilst eating your takeaway lunch packed in a plastic tray, and washing it down with a cold drink poured from a plastic bottle into a plastic cup, then you already have the answer. Leslie Milligan.

18b Myrtlehall Grdns, Dundee.