Calderdale Council, compared with other councils, is dragging its feet shamefully about putting in place arrangements to recycle all our plastic waste, not just the bottles.
That being the case, people from Blackshaw Head and Halifax have been saving their clean dry plastic in order to take it to the people who should be responsible for its recycling.
First we took many bags to the town hall where a town hall official came out to assure us that it would all be properly recycled.
Next we took bags to Morrison's supermarket in Todmorden. The manager there emerged to say that he agreed that plastic waste is indeed a problem and that he would ensure that ours would be recycled and that Morrison's did its very best to deal with its own and its customer's plastic waste.
In neither case were threats used.
On Saturday, September 6, three of us took a large number of dustbin bags full of plastic to the big Tesco Store near Halifax with a requested that Tesco recycle it. A youngish woman came out on behalf of the management and announced that this "would not do", we must take it all away or she would send for the police. I told her it would not look good if Tesco caused two 81 year old women to be bundled into police cars for staging a peaceful protest about this supermarket's failure to reduce the amount of plastic packaging it used, thereby being responsible for huge environmental damage. She repeated that she would call the police. I was prepared to stay but our driver said he did not want to be forced to put all these bags back into his car and it would be better if we left, leaving the bags behind with a notice attached to them saying why they were there. So that is what we did.
This letter is to highlight the marked contrast between the way we were treated by Tesco's management compared with the courteous treatment we received from Morrisons.
We intend to continue the protests outside other supermarkets when we have accumulated more plastic. Believe me, it doesn't take long.
Barbara Green