Letter: Nappies: a plastic peril?

Sir: Vanya Body (letter, 2 May) is to be commended even for considering using "real" nappies rather than disposables, and if she asks women old enough actually to have used the things she may get a more positive response than from her contemporaries.

Eleven years ago I chose to wash nappies rather than throw them out, and at a rough estimate the nappy-bucket routine takes about ten minutes a day. The pressure to use disposables comes from the current obsession with "convenience" at all costs, and from the simple fact that disposables are big business.

So far as I am aware, by the way, the 19th-century public hygiene laws which prohibited the disposal of raw human excrement in public waste are still in force. Would somebody advise me whether every user of disposable nappies is in fact breaking the law, and is this the basis for a counter- attack on the plastic peril?

S THURSFIELD

Oswestry, Shropshire