Some retailers received an unexpected payment this Christmas for the plastic bags they had sold to the government when it banned them earlier this year.

The payments, amounting to €245,250, cover 3.2 million of the 10.3 million plastic bags that the government had purchased from retailers. At an average of 11c per bag, the government is expected to dish out about €1.13 million to retailers.

The payments were handed out just four months after the Chamber of Small and Medium Enterprises - GRTU carried out the back office work for the government to speed up the process.

Some retailers received a refund of €80 but others received payments running into thousands of euros, some even up to €9,000.

The rest of the payments are still pending, most of them because they are being contested by the government.

The tax on plastic bags, announced in the Budget 2009, was initially meant to come into force on March 1 this year but was pushed back to May, as the new regime of 15c per bag kicked in.

Unlike a similar measure introduced in 2005 - which had failed miserably, mainly due to lack of enforcement - this regime does not differentiate between the conventional bags and those produced with environmentally-friendly degradable and biodegradable material. The same eco tax is now being paid on all these materials.

The aim of the tax is to cut drastically the estimated 40 million plastic bags the Maltese use each year.

But manufacturers, wholesalers and shop owners had lashed out at the new 15c eco tax because there was not enough time for them to dispose of their stocks. As a result, the government offered to buy the excess stocks.

A spokesman for WasteServ, the government's waste management agency which purchased the stock, said the bags had been put into bales and shipped for recycling. He could not say how much the agency had made from the sale. But it is expected to be very far below the cost of repurchase.

In a bid to ease their situation, the government offered to purchase any remaining bags from shop owners at full cost. The government believed there were three million bags on the market. But this estimate has turned out to be way off target because retailers sold WastServ 10,293,190 plastic bags.

Under the new regulations, whoever produces or imports plastic carrier bags has to print the name and address of the person registered under the Eco-Contribution Act, the registration number and the batch number of the consignment on each side of the bag.

mxuereb@timesofmalta.com