Fashion’s big failure

Your picture of a rusting ship in the dried-up Aral Sea in Kazakhstan looked like something out of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. But its appearance is caused by our rapacious appetite for cheap clothing. Intensive cotton farming has diverted waters from the sea to be used for irrigation, causing this environmental catastrophe. People think it’s great that they can buy T-shirts for pennies, but these are the consequences.

N. Higham, Cheshire There should be extra taxes on products that cause global environmental problems to make them less enticing.

H. Catt, Derbyshire