Sir - John Goddard writes that many households do not have the means to compost kitchen waste and that ways of dealing with it need to be found before the county composter starts working in 2009.

He might be interested to know that many allotmenteers would welcome a steady local supply of fruit and vegetable peelings, nut shells and the kind of unprinted, unbleached cardboard you get in the middle of toilet rolls. Supplying local allotments would reduce the environmental and other costs of transporting vegetable waste to a county recycling site. This waste has a high moisture content and is, therefore, heavy and costly to move so it makes sense to keep it local.

The allotments in my area have verges and entry spaces which could accommodate well designed storage bins for vegetable waste, which could be dropped off by council recycling operatives or by the public.

However the system might operate, the crucial message must be to keep the fruit and veg peelings free of all meat, fat, sugar and cooked foods. The food we grow needs to be fed by making compost - but we must be disciplined and starve the rats . . .

Susan Heeks, Oxford