Are supermarkets diverting attention from the real environmental issues by putting pressure onto their customers not to use plastic carrier bags? writes Mrs. M. It’s the supermarkets who started excess packaging in the first place. Why don’t they remove silly individual wrapping from their shelves.

Instead of trying to put the blame onto their customers for carrying home their shopping in plastic bags, why don’t the supermarkets mend their ways? By far the greater environmental evil is the way products are bound in blue trays and plastic on every counter in the aisles. Why is a single cucumber bound in a plastic skin which requires scissors and five minutes to remove? The supermarkets say that plastic wrapping keeps the cucumber fresher, longer. How is this possible? A cucumber is either fresh or not, depending upon when it is picked. Plastic cannot make a vegetable fresher. This is nonsense.

The marketing people at these huge stores are trivialising the serious issues. Most customers find silly packaging maddening. It is one of the scourges of our era that we have to use knives to open a tooth brush pack or a pack of batteries. Actually the supermarkets make us spend more by packing items in twos and threes, and we have to buy more than we need. It’s even worse that plastic surrounds our fresh produce. Plastic is made of petrol and chemicals. This absorbed by the produce making it anything but fresh?

Customers should vote with their feet and avoid these products or shop in small, local shops.