Sir - The lead column in your editorial (January 25) congratulates Oxford City Council on its plan to pilot a weekly kitchen waste recycling scheme.

Put another way, you commend recycling food we throw away, when what you should be doing is encouraging us not to throw it away at all.

Your heading Ahead of game for this recycling collection implies that we should embrace the weekly waste recycling scheme wholeheartedly. Well! Do we? Figures supplied by the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) tell us that the average person in the UK throws away £424 in food waste each year, amounting to £20bn worth of unused food annually, more than three times our spending on international aid.

It is our insatiable greed to over-consume and buy for the sake of buying instead of rationalising what we need, that has necessitated this recycling. Less than 60 years after rationing ended, Britain has all but exhausted the opportunities for landfill, and is having to find new ways of sorting out disposal of the rubbish we generate. If the trend continues, then in less than another generation we will be spending more money on disposing of our surpluses, than on the food we consume.

We have to stop deluding ourselves that this practice is sustainable and that there is a green light on more and more wastage.

Aside from the moral argument, we have to re-examine the problem of our greedy habits (and not just in food waste), so that we don't need fleets of recycling vehicles and armies of fluorescent-coated recycling officers clattering along our streets at 7am every week.

Instead of endorsing the city council's plan, you might suggest that the next time we shop, we all come back with 30 per cent fewer goods. And we would all still have food to spare.

Sonja Drexler, Oxford