Carrier bags are less problem than plastic packaging on the shopping
SIR – It’s all very well Theresa May raising the cost of plastic bags to 10p (report, August 25) and being so happy about the 85 per cent reduction in their use.
This is to ignore the slow progress by supermarkets in reducing non-recyclable and unnecessary packaging. The Government should bring in a law to ban this packaging.
It’s not just single-use plastic bottles and coffee cups that are the problem, but crisp packets, shrinkwrap around vegetables and coffee packaging that never biodegrade. It’s also impossible to buy a 15kg pack of dry dog food that isn’t in a huge non-recyclable bag.
Supermarkets in France, Italy and Spain sell fruit and vegetables loose, or provide biodegradable bags. I don’t see why British retailers can’t do the same. Vicki Mills
Steyning, West Sussex
SIR – Your headline “Price of a bag up to 10p in war on plastic” will have no doubt have pleased Michael Gove, the Environment Secretary. However, such attention-grabbers do not really make a fundamental difference to the way waste packaging is treated.
Making packaging lightweight is just as effective as taxing its use, and has been a global packaging industry objective for nearly 50 years.
It is naive to believe that recycling is an economic panacea. Some packaging materials simply have no secondary use or value, but serve a highly cost-effective role in their virgin state.
Since all waste packaging has an energy value, the smart solution would be to recycle items such as PET bottles, aluminium and tin-plate cans and white glass, but incinerate the rest and feed the energy created back into power network.
Incineration technology today is so clean that the environmental impact is negligible (ask the Swiss), and plenty of disused industrial sites could lend themselves to it without affecting the local environment. Kim Potter
Lambourn, Berkshire
SIR – An 85 per cent reduction in plastic shopping bags since October 2015 is remarkable, but I wonder by how much the sale of plastic bin-liners has increased in the same period. N W Bainbridge
Peterborough
SIR – I fully support the increase of the levy on plastic bags to 10p, but I must object to being forced to carry around advertising slogans on the bags that I am given. I turn them inside out. Gerard Kelly
Portchester, Hampshire
SIR – With Brexit just over six months away and no deal in sight, Cabinet ministers stabbing each other in the back, the NHS in crisis, the pound falling against major currencies, what cunning plan does our hapless Prime Minister come up with? Oh yes, the price of a carrier bag will double to 10p. Will this be Mrs May’s equivalent of John Major’s traffic-cone helpline? Keith Chambers
Basingstoke, Hampshire