In a draft budget proposal, Italy’s coalition government has included a tax of EUR 1,000/t on plastic packaging. European Plastics Converters (EuPC, Brussels / Belgium; www.plasticsconverters.eu) president Renato Zelcher, PlasticsEurope (Brussels; www.plasticseurope.org) president Javier Constante and Plastics Recyclers Europe (PRE, Brussels; www.plasticsrecyclers.eu) president Ton Emans agreed on opposing the Italian government’s proposal at a meeting held at “K 2019” in Düsseldorf.

According to the Italian workers federation, Filctem Cgil (Rome; www.filctemcgil.it), the proposed tax is likely to have negative impacts on the Italian market, in terms of job losses and consumers. The “regressive” tax would put an estimated 50,000 workers’ situations in jeopardy and affect 2,000 SMEs in the plastics value chain, said the industry associations. Italy’s consumers federation Federconsumatori (Rome; www.federconsumatori.it) is predicting that a plastic packaging tax would result in households spending EUR 140 more each year.

Zelcher, who is also CEO of films producer Crocco (Cornedo Vicentino / Italy; www.crocco.com), added that the measure would slow down circularity efforts. EuPC, PlasticsEurope and PRE noted that the plastics industry is already doing its part and together have restated the intention to work across value chains to reach the target that 10m t of recycled plastics will be used in new products on the EU market by 2025 – see Plasteurope.com of 17.12.2018.