I READ Mrs Smith's letter (June 21) with disbelief. Can she really be encouraging your readers to pollute the evening air with a home incinerator? Can anything be more thoughtless as well as injurious to health?

Such habits threaten the well being of asthma sufferers, pollute the environment and make the evenings miserable for those who would like to enjoy their gardens.

Her suggestion effectively closes the garden to people returning to their homes after a long day's work who wish to enjoy the evening air.

Stubble burning is banned for farmers. It is time private bonfires were also banned in the interests of health and good neighbourliness!

John Hamilton

Whitchurch Road, Tavistock

MRS Smith (Letters June 21): the cost of waste disposal is too cheap. That is why so little is recycled.

The appropriate place for your garden waste is on your garden, not buried in a waste tip. All organic material can be composted. Unsurprisingly, coarse stuff takes longer to decompose; speed up the process by dessicating or shredding material first. Anything larger than an inch in diameter is fuel for your stove after seasoning.

Alternatively, gather up your dry garden wastes of any size; package them up in a log-sized bundle in, for instance, a discarded paper or polythene bag. Polyethylene is clean-burning, I have been reliably assured; and similarly fuel your stove, redeeming the ash. Wasteful bonfires are unnecessary.

Besides composting and usage as fuel spreading as mulch is another possibility, perhaps best suited for shredded woodier material.

Liquification of soft garden waste is another process to consider. Grass cuttings after liquification can be poured back on to lawns to replenish nutriments removed at each cutting.

The waste you produce should be your responsibility, not mine, nor even the community's. The responsible course of action is for each of us to reuse and recycle our own wastes, or instruct somebody to do so on our behalf, for instance co-operatively with neighbours.

We shouldn't, however, pass the buck to West Devon Borough Council or Focsa. They only recycle the few things for which there is an immediate and viable and 'obvious' demand.

Materials which are wasted are substituted by those obtained by earth-devouring and habitat-destroying mining, quarrying and scalping processes; not necessarily in your back yard, but in somebody else's; and always to the detriment of wildlife.

A Langdon

Homer, Mary Tavy