Build on current bottle refund scheme instead of risking making things worse

Clearly, increasing the recycling of bottles and cans is a good idea, as opposed to the scrapping of Air Passenger Duty, which is not. But is the SNP’S bottle refund scheme the best way to go about this?

Currently, most recycling is handled by local councils. How are councils involved in the new scheme? Have they even been consulted? It looks like another opp or tunit y to centralise under SNP Government control.

But will the new scheme improve recycling rates? How many people, having paid their 20p deposit, will be bothered to return the bottle and claim the 20p back, especially if it costs more than 20p to make the trip, and they have trouble extracting the money from the unwilling shopkeeper. Collecting enough bottles meant earning enough pennies for a bag of chips in my youth, but times have moved on.

Councils say that plastic and glass bottles is the easy part of recycling. According to Edinburgh Council, they already collect a high level, around 80 percent of plastic drink bottles. Bulk fort nightly collections and communal facilities make recycling easier and encourage recycling, and councils make money out of the recycled product.

The SNP should be trying to build on the current system, not create a new one that might make things worse. And they should be putting their energies into the difficult part – excess supermarket packaging, black plastics etc.

PHIL TATE Craiglockhart Road, Edinburgh

Has anyone thought about encouraging the re-introduction of biodiesel made from recycled cooking oil through tax breaks?

Some of the most pessimistic (climate change-denying) critics of biodiesel have to concede that there would be an immediate 20 per cent reduction in the emission of harmful diesel particulates by using this fuel blended with ordinary mineral diesel.

Furthermore, they then have to go on to concede, if minor adaptations are carried out on some diesel engines, that the emission of harmful die - sel particulates falls much further with diesel vehicles running totally on biodiesel fuel.

Making biodiesel from recycled cooking oil answers virtually all the criticism of the fuel coming from within the Green movement. Is it time to look again at biodiesel made from recycled cooking oil?

John Prescott, when UK Transport Minister, virtually killed the biodiesel industry stone - dead by charging the same level of duty on biodiesel as ordinary mineral diesel. Currently millions of gallons of cooking oil are being poured down our drains every year, clogging our Victorian sewers. Who wants that to go on happening?

NIGEL BODDY Fife Road, Darlington