On 31 March 2023, the German Bundesrat approved the special levy for manufacturers of certain single-use plastics that had been passed by the Bundestag. This means that the law can probably come into force in April as planned.

The regulation, which transposes Article 5 of the EU Single-Use Plastics Directive (Directive (EU) 2019/904) into national law, stipulates that producers of single-use plastic products must register as of 2024 and pay a special levy into a fund as of 2025, depending on the respective quantity of single-use plastic products placed on the market – for example beverage cups, plastic bags, and food packaging, but also tobacco filters and balloons.

The final determination of the levy rates is to be made in a statutory order issued by the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection (BMUV) by 31 December 2023. As a discussion draft, however, the ministry had already published preliminary levy rates in January 2023, according to which EUR 0.871 would be due per kg of bag and film packaging, for example, or EUR 8.945/kg for tobacco products.

In total, the levy rates are expected to lead to revenues of EUR 434 mn, according to the draft regulation, said Christian Mayer, a lawyer at law firm Noerr (Munich, Germany; www.noerr.com). He considers the special levy and the legal structure of the fund to be “very questionable” from a constitutional point of view and sees approaches to take legal action against it.

Related: PRE welcomes EU single-use plastics directive

The money from this fund is supposed to be used to pay the costs incurred by German cities and municipalities for cleaning public areas such as streets and parks. The obligation to bear certain costs in the sense of an extended producer responsibility is supposed to contribute to “managing plastics more sustainably along the value chain, combatting littering of the environment, and promoting the cleanliness of public spaces”, according to the formal justification.

According to the initial results of a study by the association of municipal enterprises VKU, the soon-to-be banned products account for 10% and in some cases as much as 20% of all waste in public spaces, with the majority of this coming from to-go consumption.

In the run-up to the adoption, business associations had repeatedly advocated for a private-sector implementation of extended producer responsibility – as in other EU member states – instead of the model that has now been approved, which was spearheaded by the Federal Environment Agency (UBA, Dessau, Germany; www.uba.de). The associations laid out that no 30 new positions would have been necessary, because, for the most part, the pre-existing data of Germany’s central packaging register, Zentrale Stelle Verpackungsregister (ZSVR, Osnabrück; www.verpackungsregister.org), could have been used as a basis for registration.