Letters: There must be more uses for plastic

A reader says there must be a clever use for plastic. Photo/File

When you see disgusting amounts of plastic products in various rivers overseas and then ask where will it end up, it also makes you wonder where all our plastic waste is going.

New Zealand has a reputation for being leaders in technology, Sir Ernest Rutherford for example, not to mention all the other people inventing world leading things, like flying catamaran racing yachts.

How come no Kiwi cunning is being put to use to find a way to turn the plastic waste we must be stockpiling into something useful, such as road-building material.

Surely there is an obvious need to work out a use for all this unwanted product rather than to just bang on about supermarkets' use of plastic bags.

It goes further than that and perhaps our Government might stump up some cash for some scientific research to be done on the subject, such as melting it and changing its structure into something like the plant-mix roading product now being used.

Work out how to handle product and lay it on the roads, then cook it to bond it together to form a tough surface.

Colour can be optional.

Surely some Kiwi genius can find an answer to solve a world wide problem.

Rod Petterson
Rotorua

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Job losses

I was very sad to read that five of the brilliant staff who maintain Rotorua's parks and gardens are to be made redundant.

These are the people who save our city from looking like a squalid mess.

If Rotorua Lakes Council needs to make economies on staff salaries, might I suggest that the job losses ahould occur much further up the pecking order, for example among those who masterminded the farcical re-organisation of rural rubbish collection.

Nick Miller
Okere Falls