If Meredith Warren (“Don’t sack my plastic bags’’) actually manages to find a use for all of the many plastic bags a week that she takes home, perhaps she ought to consider that she has too much stuff and creates too much waste. For irony, I can’t really improve on her reference to possessing “stashes of plastic bags stuffed inside other bursting plastic bags.’’ Does she feel people need plastic bags because they have too many plastic bags?

I use reusable bags at the supermarket. If I forget them when I enter the store, I picture the Texas-sized island of trash floating in the Pacific, and then I go back out and get the bags. It is a tiny, nearly effortless sacrifice, compared to what is really needed to save the environment. And even without a constant supply of “free’’ plastic supermarket bags, I somehow seem to have more than enough containers for my stuff.

While I applaud Warren’s concern for the poor, whom she apparently feels are as unable to bring reusables to the market as she, I would point out that in Rwanda (not known for its wealthy liberal elites), they seem to have made the transition to reusable bags just fine. Nearly every other developed country in the world manages to charge for their bags without plunging their citizens into poverty.

Daniel Hart

West Roxbury