Eco tax on plastic bags in February

The legal notice on the eco contribution on plastic bags will be published in February and retailers and importers will have the chance to air their views beforehand, a government spokesman said yesterday.

A draft of the legal notice on the €0.15 contribution, which had been expected to come into force last Thursday, following the Budget announcement, will be issued in the coming days.

The tax falls under the government's eco-friendly measures in an attempt to reduce the 40 million plastic bags used by the Maltese every year.

The spokesman was reacting to a statement of the Chamber for Small and Medium Enterprises, GRTU, which informed retailers they were not legally obliged to charge the £0.15 tax because the legal notice had not yet been issued.

The GRTU said it was unacceptable for the government to force retailers to make any changes to their cash registers and point of sales systems.

However, when contacted, a government spokesman said January 1 was not the set deadline for the implementation of the tax.

Retailers and importers will be able to give their reactions before the final legal notice is drafted and published.

However, the spokesman said that the actual figure of €0.15 will not change. Instead, stakeholders will be able to discuss and propose any changes in the implementation of the tax. Following the consultation process, the draft notice will be updated and the final version published in early February.

The government also took note of complaints put forward by retailers and the GRTU about changing their cash registers.

"The government is actively tackling this issue and doing its best to resolve it," the spokesman said.

However, the plastic bag manufacturers yesterday lashed out at proposals put forward by the GRTU, accusing the chamber of not being eco-friendly.

The GRTU had suggested that retailers treat plastic bags as a normal stock items with customers paying the eco contribution, the actual price of the bag, their own profit margin and VAT. In a joint statement, Traplas and Inserv Ltd. criticised this proposal saying manufacturers and importers would have to pay the tax before customers bought the bags.

They said manufacturers and importers would have to include the eco contribution as part of their invoice to retailers, which would mean paying the government for the contribution even before the bags were actually bought by consumers.

They recalled that when the government had introduced a €0.02c contribution in 2005, plastic bags were imported from other European countries and then sold to retailers without the eco contribution, to the disadvantage of manufacturers.

Retailers used to buy a small amount of plastic bags from local manufacturers to have a convenient smokescreen if checks were carried out by environment inspectors.

The GRTU's proposals would lead to the same abuse, they insisted: "The eco contribution will make the new system far more transparent and enforceable than the former one that was simply too over laden with abuse to be effective and to reach its environmental goals."

"If GRTU really wishes to safeguard the environment, it should support the government measure as announced in the Budget and not thwart it in such a manner as to make it unenforceable, unfair between manufacturers and importers, as well as unjust for customers - all on the flimsy excuse that retailers cannot even make the slightest change to the way they are used to doing business."