Spain resorts to a green tax to fight against plastic

The Ministry for the Ecological Transition has unsheathed on Tuesday what for many is the best tool to fight against environmental problems and to change harmful behaviors: taxation. It has put on the table a new tax to reduce plastic waste. This figure, which foresees an annual collection of 724 million, is contemplated within the draft law on waste and contaminated soils that has been approved this Tuesday by the Council of Ministers and that now begins its processing. If the deadlines are greatly accelerated, the rule would be definitively ready in the first half of 2021.

This law sets as a great objective to reduce by 15% the generation of all waste in the country in 2030 compared to 2010 levels. And with it Spain will join the fight against plastic waste that the European institutions started a couple of years ago. In fact, one of the raison d’être of the standard is to incorporate the two waste and plastics directives that the European Union approved in 2018 and 2019. Spain will thus set by law the veto from July 2021 on the sale of single-use plastic objects such as cutlery and straws. In addition, microplastics that are added to cosmetic products and detergents will be banned, and bars will be forced to make free tap water available to customers from the final approval of the standard. These are some of the measures that are intended to contribute to the global fight against this pollution. A year “eight million tons of plastic” reach the oceans, recalled on Tuesday the vice president and minister for the
Ecological Transition, Teresa Ribera.

But the draft goes beyond the directives by setting this new tax and uses a formula already used, for example, to fight obesity in many countries through levies on sugary drinks. The proposed tax will now be indirect and will fall on “the manufacture, import or intra-community acquisition of non-reusable plastic containers that will be used in the Spanish market,” according to the Ministry for the Ecological Transition. Ribera has justified this tax and the rest of the measures of the law in the “absolutely excessive, irrational and irresponsible use” that is made of plastic packaging.

The ministry has explained that the new tax is “similar to the one that is intended to be implemented in other countries” such as the United Kingdom and Italy. “The tax rate will be 0.45 euros per kilogram of packaging,” he adds. Taking into account the latest available data, corresponding to the year 2017, the Government estimates that about 724 million euros could be collected annually.

Ribera has admitted the great shortcomings that Spain has in terms of environmental taxes. The European Commission and international organizations such as the OECD or the IMF have been urging Spain for years to undertake a reform of its green taxation to increase its collection and penalize polluting activities more. The ministry recalled on Tuesday that, according to 2017 data, the country “has the fifth lowest percentage of environmental income with respect to the GDP of the EU.” Specifically, “revenues derived from green taxation accounted for only 1.83% of GDP, compared to an EU average of 2.40%,” added this department. “Spain has a very high margin of action in terms of green taxation,” summarized the vice president.

At the beginning of the year, the Government opened a public consultation on environmental taxation. He announced the possibility of implementing a tax on single-use plastic packaging. Finally, this tax has been included in the law on waste and contaminated soils. At the same time, another consultation was opened on another new tax on air transport. That was in February, before the pandemic hit the aviation sector particularly virulently; nothing is known about this tax, which could well have been included in the climate change bill that the Government recently approved and that is already being processed by Congress. Although it was not done.

The European Commission has been considering implementing a tax on plastics for a couple of years. Brussels estimates that between 3,000 and 9,000 million could be raised throughout the EU depending on its scope and these funds would also serve to finance the recovery after the economic crisis of covid-19. But Brussels has not yet given the green light to that tax. The first proposal released in 2018 by the Commission called for a single EU levy of €0.8 per kilogram of non-recycled packaging.

It was not only international institutions that were calling on Spain for a green tax reform. The main environmental organizations – Greenpeace, Ecologists in Action, WWF, SEO/Birdlife and Friends of the Earth – have been proposing to use these tools to tax the most harmful activities for many years. “We think it is great that a tax is put in place so that the environmental cost is paid,” Julio Barea, of Greenpeace, said on Tuesday. “But let it be a real cost.” Barea thus complains about the low tax that is proposed in his opinion, those 45 cents per kilo.

On the absolutely opposite side is Luis Cediel, general director of Anaip, the Spanish Association of Plastics Industrialists. “We can’t be against the tax anymore,” he sums up. His association already argued against this tax when the public consultation was opened and regrets the “demonization” of plastic that is made, whether single-use or otherwise. Anaip considers that the proposed tax is “discriminatory”, since it only taxes a single use of plastics and not other materials, and “unfair”, since it “undermines competitiveness and endangers the survival” of a sector that generates 93,000 direct jobs.

Source: The Country