YOUR article on motorway littering ("Drive to clear motorways of 120 tonnes of litter each year", The Herald, June 10) and the accompanying editorial ("Let us put litter in its place", The Herald, June 10) were valuable in asking people to behave more responsibly by taking their litter home.
However, taking one's litter home is only one part of the answer to this problem.
Modern retail distribution relies on wrapping almost everything we buy in high-tech and virtually indestructible packaging. The volumes of resultant waste are huge.
Packaging is a boon for the manufacturers and retailers as it keeps their costs down and disposal of the waste is not their responsibility. Our society is drowning in packaging and we must look to ways of reducing the use of these materials, reusing where possible (for example, bottles), and making all of what we must use either recyclable or biodegradable. The manufacturers and retailers may cavil at the increased costs, but either they pay or society pays through waste disposal charges, or by suffering an environment strewn with the debris of our technological age.
Bob Downie,
66 Mansewood Road, Glasgow.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
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