Q Should the government restrict distribution of plastic bags?
A photograph of the DAB party handing out free 'environmentally friendly' carrier bags in your competitor's newspaper serves to compound the folly of the plastic bag tax.
The free bags were made from non-woven polypropylene, which is, if you know your chemicals, a plastic bag!
These bags are made by hand, cut, printed, sewn and then turned inside out to receive all your food shopping, touching whatever germs were on the grubby hands of the dozens of workers who handled it during manufacture.
Your leader today puts this whole issue into perspective - 5.5 million tonnes of waste annually, excluding construction waste. The 33 million bags a day used (a fantasy figure, unsubstantiated - six bags a day for every man, woman and child is preposterous and hotly disputed by the HK Plastic Bag Manufacturers' Association) weigh a likely 36,000 tonnes per annum, representing 0.6 per cent of the waste if, and only if, every bag goes to landfill, which patently they do not.
Changing public habits by educating them, not by taxing them, is the intelligent way forward.
Neil Young, Glasgow, Scotland
