Eco taxes 'do not promote green practices'

GreenPak, the non-profit organisation in charge of the Green Dot system in Malta, strongly believes eco taxes do not promote environmentally sound practices and neither do they encourage industry to take up producers' responsibilities.

GreenPak, which met the commission dealing with the eco contribution, said members of the Green Dot system paid for the recycling of their products so they should not be made to pay the eco contribution as well.

The cost of recycling a kilogramme of packaging material through GreenPak was at least seven times cheaper than eco taxes as charged by the government.

GreenPak said that Malta had already missed last May's target of recycling a minimum of 18 per cent of its packaging waste and would most definitely miss the December target of recycling 27 per cent of packaging waste. The government had yet to announce its plans to implement this EU directive.

The Green Dot system, GreenPak said, was widely used in 24 European countries. Ten old EU states and nine new ones have implemented the system.

New EU countries such as the Czech Republic, Estonia and Latvia were well on their way to reaching their targets while accession countries like Bulgaria and Turkey had also started implementing the directive.

The Green Dot system was an established and well-approved system in Europe that had been extremely successful when it came to implementing the waste packaging directive, to the extent that some countries were exceeding their targets, GreenPak said.