You report (9 December) that Harrogate Spring Water – owned by the multinational Danone, the world’s second-largest producer of bottled water – is planning to cut down a wood planted by schoolchildren in order to expand its bottling factory. Net result: more plastic bottles, fewer mature trees to extract carbon from the atmosphere. Bottled water is unnecessary when tap water is available. Environmental crisis, what environmental crisis?
Julia Wood
Duns, Berwickshire
• How sad – but how telling – that one of the first uses thought up for Google’s new quantum computing chip should be “the creation of new drugs” (Report, 9 December), rather than, say, how to abolish poverty and homelessness.
Pete Lavender
Nottingham
