WASTE MANAGEMENT: I READ with interest your recent views on waste management (Comment, Apr 24).

County Durham residents already have local authority-managed kerbside recycling schemes which collect, as a minimum, aluminium and steel cans, paper and glass.

Facilities for recycling many more materials are also available at our network of Household Waste Recycling Centres. However, such approaches alone will not be able to deliver a waste management service fit for the 21st century.

Finding alternatives to landfill is the focus for all authorities which are subject to increasingly stringent Government targets relating to the quantities of waste they can landfill between now and 2020.

There is also an increasingly urgent need for the public and businesses to take greater responsibility for helping to manage their waste themselves.

But it is not just the achievement of targets and driving waste away from landfill which are the real issues. The wider agenda of viewing waste as a resource from which to produce new raw materials and products is more important.

These include producing energy from waste and waste treatment processes, such as that at Thornley, which turns unsegregated household waste into usable materials and is diverting up to 80 per cent from landfill.

The real way forward is about introducing measures to manage waste in a way which can impact positively on the social, environmental and economic well-being of an area rather than simply seek to dispose of waste as cheaply as possible. - Councillor Brian Myers, Cabinet Member for Waste Management, Durham County Council.

TAXING BELIEF

NOT so many moons age people were encouraged to be eco-friendly by recycling etc.

One of the options for the motorist was to have their car converted to LPG (liquid petroleum gas).

Being the eco-friendly person that I am I had my car converted to LPG at a cost of £1,200.

Under the recent Budget it was announced by our illustrious Chancellor, Gordon Brown, that cars were to be categorised as to the more eco-friendly the less tax they would pay.

I rang the Vehicle Licensing Authority to see what road tax I would now have to pay and was told as my car starts on petrol and then switches automatically to LPG it was classed as petrol.

Then I was told that as my car, which is registered 1998, predates the new emissions regulations 2002, then it would not qualify for any tax reduction.

All LPG cars, including new models, start on petrol.

So the powers to be yet again in their infinite wisdom have decided that I, as well as many others, do not qualify for a road tax reduction. That is bureaucracy gone mad.

I have already started to eat my hat. - Ray Vincent, Darlington.

RAILWAY RENEWAL

SURELY no one accuses Tony Kelly (HAS, Apr 24) of seeking the impossible, but I cannot share his belief that our demolished railway lines, with all the associated bridges, stations, and other infrastructure, could be rebuilt on a scale sufficient to ease Britain's transport problems.

As for road tolls, I did not suggest them, as Mr Kelly alleges, but they are not impracticable, as Ken Livingstone can testify. Their great appeal to our rulers is that the technology already exists - the great fear in government is of electoral consequences. I suspect a few pilot schemes will appear first, to test the public response. - Bob Jarratt, Caldwell, Richmond.

LOCAL ELECTIONS

I FEEL sorry for all the hard working candidates and canvassers for the three main parties in the local elections, but, like many, I shall be deciding on the basis of national issues.

For me, that means delivering a slap in the face to those parties, through a spoilt ballot paper or a cross for one of the parties that they are all agreed I absolutely mustn't vote for. Enough people doing that might frighten some sense into them.

I particularly want to avoid supporting the New Conservatives or the Lib Dems. Neither of them has much chance of replacing the Government after the next General Election, despite its increasingly obvious incompetence.

Neither would make much useful difference if it did. Our best chance of transforming the political landscape would be to give Labour so many MPs that it splits. - John Riseley, Harrogate.

MUSEUM SIGNPOSTING

I RECENTLY visited Locomotion: The National Railway Museum in Shildon, and was left in no doubt that the cost of £11m was well spent.

The exhibits and facilities are excellent. However, the staff are continuously receiving complaints about the very poor signposting.

The brown tourist signs amount to fingerposts at road junctions and are the smallest I have ever seen.

If the authorities would sanction the erection of larger advance signs I am confident that the attendance would improve enormously, especially if they were in place before the summer season.

People are known to have given up trying to find the site. - JR Hall, Chester-le-Street.

STANDARD LIFE

JEREMY Gates has his facts wrong in his piece, "Why are so many with-profits investors living with-losses" (Business Echo, Apr 25), when he states that the Financial Services Authority (FSA) "directed" Standard Life to sell shares and invest in fixed interest investments such as UK gilts.

It is not for the FSA to tell a firm how much of its assets to hold in a particular class. It did not do so for Standard Life and it will not do so for any other life company. - Rob McIvor, Head of Media Relations, Financial Services Authority.

DIFFICULT OPTION

SMALL changes in our lifestyle in diet and exercise can add years to our lives, we are told.

Might it be a good idea to walk to and from the gym, whereas many pay for their exercise and use petrol in the process. As a result, they may save money and make an extra contribution to the reduction of global warming. The price of petrol and membership of exercise clubs might also go down with reduced demand. Lower transport costs also affect many other costs and prices. - George Appleby, Clifton, York.

TIDIER LAND?

REGARDING A Walton's letter, Filthy Man of Europe? (HAS, Apr 20). I thought that he may not know, but in Bremerhaven, Germany, where my niece lives, there is a deposit on drink containers - cans and plastic bottles - that are scattered across big areas of England, as mentioned in your correspondent's letter. They wouldn't be scattered about here if a similar system was adopted. - A W Farrow, Middlesbrough.

HONOURS: NEW LOW

WE'VE sunk to a new low with the sale of honours - not the lordships and knighthoods which were always suspect anyway, but the Blue Peter badges (recent reports pointed out that they could be bought on eBay instead of being earned). It really is too much. We cannot go on devaluing our culture in this way. - Colin Dent, Croxdale, Durham.