The plastics tax that the German federal government recently postponed for 12 months is now scheduled to come into force next year. What impact will this have on the sale of plastic-coated paper packaging in the period up to 2030? German packaging market research association Gesellschaft für Verpackungsmarktforschung (GVM, Mainz; www.gvmonline.de) recently looked into in a current study commissioned by plastic packaging industry association Industrievereinigung Kunststoffverpackungen (IK, Bad Homburg; www.kunststoffverpackungen.de) to find answers.

The result is hardly surprising – a tax levied solely on plastic would give paper composites an advantage and boost a sales trend that has been apparent for a number of years. The volume split in the lightweight packaging fraction of Germany’s dual system has recently been shifting from plastics to paper composites, as reported by the central agency packaging register, Zentrale Stelle Verpackungsregister (ZSVR, Osnabrück; www.verpackungsregister.org).

The trend would be boosted still further by a tax levied exclusively on the plastics fraction of packaging (plastics tax). In this case, the GVM would expect the volume of paper composites used each year to increase to more than 700,000 t. In 2020, consumption was still at 241,000 t.

In this context, Kurt Schüler, managing partner of GVM, criticised the fact that, in the dual system, paper composites are “incorrectly listed as paper mono-packaging” in a considerable number of cases. In terms of the level of licence fee, this means they are rated more cheaply by a factor of six.