With the second wave of infections, the government decides to postpone the plastic tax once again. It will come into force in July 2021.
The time for the plastic tax — the tax on the production and consumption of single-use plastic packaging — to come into force seems as though it will never arrive. The new 2021 budget law passed by the government this week (though its parliamentary approval process will continue until the end of the year) stipulates that the tax will be able to see the light of day in July 2021.
This is not the first postponement. Provided for by the budget law 12 months ago, the 2020 budget measure stipulated that it would come into force in the middle of this year, but the economic crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic had led the government, in the April decree, to push everything back to the following year.
Now, with infections once again rising sharply and economic recovery more than uncertain, the plastic tax and the sugar tax — the other tax on sugary drinks aimed at delivering health benefits for consumers — are being pushed back for the second time. The July 2021 date is nothing more than a compromise between those who were inclined to respect the deadlines and those in the worlds of politics and business who were calling for everything to be postponed by another year outright.
On the eve of the budget law being passed, Luigi Marattin, chairman of the Finance Committee of the Chamber of Deputies, had said: "I fail to see the point, in the middle of a pandemic and with gross domestic product (GDP) falling by 10 per cent, of introducing two new taxes (plastic tax and sugar tax, ed.), about which the business world has already expressed many reservations. Do we really need to hurt ourselves like this?".
Among the business figures who have spoken out in recent days is Luca Busi, the chief executive of Sibeg, a Sicilian company that recently celebrated 60 years of collaboration with Coca-Cola, of which it is the official bottler for Italy: "The plastic and sugar taxes weigh like boulders on our heads and on our 151 workers at risk," he said in an interview with La Sicilia. "They could radically change the fate of our company."
The plastic tax — which is, to be precise, a tax on the consumption of single-use plastic products, that is non-recyclable ones, accompanied by incentives for companies that produce biodegradable and compostable plastic goods — will cost 45 cents per kilogram of plastic produced, including Tetra Pak.
The delay does not sit well with environmental protection organisations, which had already protested back in April. "The plastic tax affair is emblematic of the lack of coherence and assumption of responsibility on the part of politicians when it comes to the circular economy — without which overcoming technical limitations will not be enough to get the sector off the ground," explained Francesco Ferrante, vice-president of the Kyoto Club. Words that ring even truer when one considers that the effect of contagion has increased the use of single-use products.
