SIR: During the past week we have been subjected to the usual hype from Bolton Council about their "green" credentials and the European "Sustainable City" certificate awarded on the basis of the promises made in their Local Agenda 21 statement.

Yet LA21 is founded on the principles of public participation and open government, and on real issues of pollution and public health Bolton Council is about as closed a shop as you can get.

To be "sustainable" means giving back to the environment as much as you take out. That doesn't mean, as our Council seem to think, taking out clean raw materials and giving back waste and pollution. Their failure to take action to reduce waste, abysmal recycling performance, and support for energy wasting and polluting incineration make a nonsense of their promises. They can't even agree on their own waste management plan

Bolton Council understand all this perfectly well, yet they continue to perform their charade year after year. No wonder so few people can be bothered to vote for them.

D Watson

(For Bolton Friends of the Earth)

Millgate,

Egerton, Bolton

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.