Letters | 25 January 2018

Reasons to use less plastic

Sir: Yes, packaging from petrochemicals is bad, but what if we set out to use less of it? Like Ross Clark, I was once dismayed by wilting vegetables in my village shop (‘The great plastic panic’, 20 January). Then the shop closed, to be replaced by a community shop and café which stocks produce from local farmers and steers away from excess plastic packaging. This is not just a middle-class rural luxury: grass roots movements such as Food Assemblies are springing up in major cities, enabling shoppers to bring their own bags and buy food straight from producers who don’t put their vegetables in plastic costumes. These may be micro-gestures, but they point to the need for a root-and-branch rethink of packing in our food industry. It would be heartening, for a start, to see British supermarkets introduce dispensers for dry foodstuffs, and incentivise customers to re-use bottles and containers, as is common practice on the continent.

And can we also widen the debate about plastic vs paper bags beyond climate change? Albatrosses and other seabirds are not dying excruciating deaths as a result of swallowing bits of waterlogged brown paper, are they?
Tessa Strickland

Freshford, Somerset

Go and see Darkest Hour

Sir: I think Charles Moore should rethink and go to see Darkest Hour (The Spectator’s Notes, 20 January). As regards the power of the central performance, I can only say (as someone whose father was at Dunkirk as a BEF staff officer who refused early evacuation and remained as a despatch rider, and who married my mother in Northumberland only two weeks after repatriation) that it moved me to understand how this moment and this individual inspired, for my parents’ generation, their endurance of the four years ahead.