Letters to the editor: Leave my plastic bags alone

Single-use plastic bags should be left alone, a reader says. Photo/Getty Images

What single-use bags?

I am fed up with people saying we cannot have single-use plastic bags any more, the sort used at checkouts at supermarkets and other businesses.

I do not know anyone who does not use these "single use" bags for either rubbish, giving people items in, ie at the moment I am giving away mandarins and oranges in these bags, in summer it will be other fruit and vegetables, plants I have taken out of the garden to give to people.

I also take the knitting I have done for the baby ward to the hospital in these bags, items I have to donate the charities.

Single-use bags, to me, are the bags that my potatoes came in, carrots, apples, muesli, most items in my pantry they are single-use bags.

To me, supermarkets are just making people buy other bags which I do have and use 99 per cent of the time, will we be like Coles in Australia, where people just left groceries on the counter and left when told they had to buy another bag (which they are left at home or in the car)?

And now Coles are back to using the supermarket checkout bags (I refuse to call them single-use bags).

Get rid of the plastic bags from manufacturers.

Wendy Galloway
Ōmokoroa

Love, not knowledge

Knowledge is held in such high regard that a recent NZ Prime Minister had a knowledge conference upon entering power.

Knowledge is, they tell us, so important that the fruits from its branches will feed, nourish and grow us better forever. That's pretty important, right?

And yet here we are, full of knowledge and know-how, the most educated people in the history of Earth, the wealthiest generation mankind has ever produced, so how come we're so grumpy?

How come there are so many poor people? How come they are so many failed marriages? How come there are so many people getting beaten up, inside the family?

How come there's all this anger? How come there are so many drug problems? And how is it that so many people with so much, can be so grumpy because of what they don't have?

Look around you. Look beside you. Look in the mirror. Look anywhere you like and you will see families failing and falling in huge numbers.

She won't speak to me because blah blah. I don't like him because blah blah. They're no good because blah blah.

Why are we all so precious? Why are we always so right and everyone else so wrong?

How much more knowledge do we need to make everything better again?

Perhaps our happiness is not really about knowing more stuff.

Maybe it's all about how we treat one another?

Maybe it's really about love, not knowledge?

Graeme Martin
Tauranga