Sir - It is sad to see that we as a community have chosen to use incineration as the means of recycling used materials.

I don't blame the council - they are legally bound to dispose of the contents of our bins, and they are soon going to be not able to use landfill (which is anyway a very poor method of disposal).

However, we collectively have indicated that it it is just too much trouble to play our part by separating used materials, recycling and composting. It is good to see that there will soon be facilities for collection of food waste for central processing. I hope that it will be anaerobically digested, so as to generate methane for powering the equipment, and exporting to the gas grid.

It should be possible to recycle all food wastes, garden cuttings, paper and cardboard.

The difficult area is plastics. I think that the time has come when legal constraints have to be placed on the types of plastics used for different purposes, so that pure streams of used plastics can be properly reconstituted into the same types of plastics for re-use.

For example, perhaps PET would be the appropriate choice to be used for all containers used to deliver food of any kind. It is, of course, also time for the widespread elimination of the throwaway use-once plastic carrier bag.

But whatever soft plastics are in fact used, they also ought to be of one type of plastic only. One of the worst aspects of the implementation of incinerators is that there will be contractual requirements for councils to deliver waste streams with sufficiently high calorific value.

This will absolutely conflict with recycling of combustible materials beyond a certain level.

Chris Osman, Oxford