Sir, – I confess that I pay for fruit and vegetables wrapped in plastic, salad trapped in non-recyclable bags, cucumbers isolated from the world in plastic film and, to my shame, the odd time I have succumbed to strawberries in plastic trays resting comfortably on bubble-wrap sheets.
So why not just refuse to buy this produce in plastic coats?
It is marketing – human beings are lazy, the retailers are geniuses!
It’s so easy to grab the punnet of plastic-wrapped plums!
I try to resist, but I fail usually, and the retailer wins, making huge profits, and I end up with a guilty plastic mess and nowhere to recycle it.
You may think the retailers must pay tax on their plastic waste before the sale.
No so.
Food packaging is excluded and not captured under the plastic bag levy; a lot of it is classified by the grocery seller as “not currently recyclable”.
Have you every heard such rubbish in all your days? “Not currently recyclable”? It’s like saying that diesel engine fumes are “not currently clean”.
We need a law to ban this plastic pest. – Yours, etc,
B MURPHY,
Dublin 15.