On Monday 16 September, the European Court of Auditors published its assessment of the first results of the EU’s new own resource based on non-recycled plastic packaging waste, the exact data not being available until two years after the year in question.
Introduced in 2021 (see EUROPE 12849/13), the ‘plastic tax’ will have generated more than €7 billion for the EU budget by 2023, or 4% of total EU revenue, according to the Court of Auditors. It has been calculated on the basis of the volume of waste: for each tonne of non-recycled plastic packaging waste at the end of its life, Member States must pay 800 euros.
This own resource had been created to finance the borrowing by the EU as part of the EU’s post-Covid-19 Recovery Plan. The report by the EU’s Court of Auditors, however, is clear: Member States were not sufficiently prepared.
“The calculation method [for this new budgetary instrument] still has too many flaws”, noted Lefteris Christoforou, the member of the Court responsible for the audit. For example, 22 Member States have sent in estimates that are too low for the first year of implementation of this ‘plastic tax’, in 2021. In hindsight, the data obtained in 2023 revealed that these estimates were 1.4 billion kilograms below the actual figure. When translated into own resources, this gap has been underestimated by €1.1 billion, i.e. around a fifth of the €5.9 billion collected in 2021. The Court of Auditors notes that this error had to be offset by another resource in order to balance the budget.
The Court of Auditors’ report attributes these approximations to the unreliability of Member States’ data and their failure to check whether plastic packaging is recycled. In general terms, European auditors are calling for the harmonisation of monitoring methods between Member States, to ensure that the data shared is accurate.
The same participants pointed out that only five Member States had incorporated the directive on packaging and packaging waste into their national legislation by the deadline that had been set, prompting the European Commission to initiate infringement proceedings against the other 22 Member States.
Read the report here: https://aeur.eu/f/dg5 (Original version in French by Florent Servia)