YOUR article regarding coastal pollution was interesting ("Sea change", Herald Magazine, February 3). The comments of Kevin Ross, who chairman of the Scottish Rubber and Plastics Association, were worthy of debate.

I am genuinely sure Mr Ross is a responsible man and sees both the benefits and the issues relating to the product he promotes.

He says that the use of plastic reduces food waste. I take issue with that.

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Even with the plastic in which supermarkets so obsessively wrap our products, in the UK we throw away almost seven million tons of food in a year, wasting £13 billion of food, the equivalent of £470 per household.

Could it be that much of this is caused by the promotion of by-one-get-one-free deals (encouraged by the long shelf life plastic affords) and the fact that our food buying habits have changed so much facilitated by plastic packaging?

Instead of buying little and often, we buy in bulk on a weekly basis because our perfectly plastic-packaged food allows us to buy so far in advance. And because so much gets stuck at the back of the fridge or larder, we throw so much away when it has passed its sell-by date. Thus plastic packaging isn’t so much the cure for the problem; it is the problem.

We are simply adding the problems of plastic waste to the problem of food wastage.

It is time we introduced an environment tax which brings home the hidden cost of our convenience. It would be based on the environmental damage goods inflict on our environment and climate. It would bring the environmental cost to the point of consumption rather than clean-up and reflect the true cost of our food production. It could and should be applied to all the products we consume.

It might even reinvigorate the high street making the local greengrocer, butcher and baker who don’t have the scale to "economically” wrap their produce in plastic and who will happily wrap three bananas in a brown paper bag for us, competitive with the supermarket giants which hoodwink us into thinking there is such a thing as cheap food. If prices end up higher, perhaps that would be offset by the saving of £470 per household in reduced food wastage because we revert to consuming as we buy.

Of course, an environment tax would only be part of the solution – there are basic fundamental societal issues to address – but it would be a start.

William Thomson,

25 Lithgow Place, Denny.