The Energy and Environment Ministry has announced a system of grants to support households investing in water filtration and domestic reverse osmosis systems, thus reducing single-use plastic bottles.

The €1million ‘Be Water Smart Scheme’ scheme offers three types of grants, to cater for the different systems:

• Be Water Smart: Water Guard is applicable for water filtration systems.  The grant rate is of 40% of the purchase price and installation cost with a capping of €100. 
• Be Water Smart: RO Wave, is applicable for reverse osmosis.  The grant rate is of 15.25% of the purchase price and installation cost with a capping of €100.
•  Be Water Smart: RO Recycle, is applicable for reverse osmosis with wastewater returned to the residential water storage. The grant rate is of 40% of the purchase price and installation cost with a capping of €300.

The ministry said the offered amounts are an improvement on a previous scheme which stood at 15.25% on the purchase price and installation, with a capping of €70.

Energy and environment minister Miriam Dalli announcing the grants.

“It is estimated that each household buys some 500 plastic bottles every year. Through campaigns such as Saving Our Blue, we collect approximately 200kg of bottles and bottle caps just from beach and dive clean-ups. We know that more households want to live sustainably and understand the value of water conservation. Hence, we wanted to present schemes that truly encourage the transition towards sustainable practices in our daily lives,” minister Miriam Dalli said when announcing the scheme.

It is estimated that the uptake of the scheme will result in an approximate reduction of 3 million plastic bottles per year.  

Further information is available on servizz.gov.mt or call 153.

Late last year the government in association with the private sector also introduced a bottles and cans recycling scheme (BCRS), also aimed at reducing the number of bottles that end up in waste streams.