The ministry wants to increase the fees for plastic bottles by 2,000 percent. Producers outraged

The Ministry of Climate and Environment sent a draft regulation to the so-called the SUP Act (single use plastic – ed.). According to “Rzeczpospolita”, beverage producers are negatively surprised by the increase in the fee for introducing plastic bottles to the market (this applies to bottles with water, juice, but also kefir). It is to be PLN 0.20 per bottle, while it was previously announced that it would be 1 penny.

Fee for the introduction of plastic bottles. It’s not a penny increase

It might seem that the increase is a penny, but the effect of scale must be taken into account. It is not known how many PET bottles are produced in Poland, but it is known that as many as 4.2 billion of less used glass bottles were produced last year.

It is therefore not surprising that the proposal outraged producers who believe that such a scale of increases has no substantive justification and contradicts the opinion of the Ministry of Climate and Environment attached to the draft act in February 2023, contained in the Regulatory Impact Assessment, that the fee of PLN 1 a penny per item or, respectively, per kg of a disposable product referred to in Annex 9 to the Act, will allow for the proper management of waste generated from these products, and thus reduce environmental pollution, in particular the marine environment.

“These rates are not allowed”

– There is no justification for the current proposal of the Ministry of Culture and Environment, in which the rate was increased by 2,000 percent after only three months. This raises serious doubts as to the legitimacy of the currently proposed rate and raises the suspicion that it was determined arbitrarily, using unknown “estimates” of the Institute of Environmental Protection-PIB. There is absolutely no agreement from the dairy industry for such rates – says Agnieszka Maliszewska, general director of the Polish Chamber of Milk, in an interview with “Rzeczpospolita”.

In turn, the vice-president of the Polish Federation of Food Producers (PFPŻ), Andrzej Gantner, emphasizes that such a large difference between the proposal developed for the purposes of proceedings in the Sejm and the current draft of the regulation undermines the reliability of the information presented by the Ministry of Climate and Environment, on the basis of which the Sejm and Senate made decisions on the adoption of the law.