EU members dodging full plastic tax, Court of Auditors says

The European Commission must fix flaws in its plastic tax rules to prevent member countries from underpaying for their non-recycled plastic packaging waste, the European Court of Auditors concluded in a report published today.
The plastics own resource — a form of tax on non-recycled plastic waste, and a key pillar in the EU’s efforts to reduce plastic waste — was failing on multiple fronts, with both member countries and the Commission sharing the blame, the report found.
“In a nutshell … the member states were not sufficiently prepared, and the data used for this calculation was not sufficiently comparable and reliable,” the ECA’s Alberto Gasperoni told POLITICO.
These failings had consequences for the EU budget. According to the ECA, 22 of the 27 member countries underestimated the amount of non-recycled plastic packaging waste they produced in 2021, which meant that contributions from the tax were €1.1 billion less than they should have been in the first year of implementation.
In January 2021 the European Commission introduced a new tax on member countries based on how much non-recycled plastic packaging waste they produce, charging a fee of 80 cents for each kilogram. It had hoped to provide a new revenue source for the 2021-2027 EU budget, while providing an incentive for countries to improve their plastic recycling infrastructure. Plastic is the second most common kind of packaging waste generated in the EU, according to Eurostat.
The ECA’s audit — carried out from June 2023 to February 2024 — found that the calculations that determine how much each country should contribute were flawed, because of “persistent problems with data comparability and reliability” regarding the amount of packaging reportedly produced and thrown out by countries.
The audit also warned that countries may not always adequately check that recyclable plastic packaging does actually get recycled, which increases the risk of miscalculations for the contributions.
 “It looks like it can be a big issue,” the ECA’s lead auditor on the report, Jose Parente, told POLITICO, reiterating the ECA’s call for the Commission to “[investigate] more in detail, and if necessary, [set a] necessary framework” to address the failings.
Countries were not “sufficiently prepared” for the new own resource, the audit found, largely because they failed to transpose the EU’s rules on packaging and packaging waste into national law in time. While the Court of Auditors noted efforts made by the Commission to support member countries, this was not done quickly enough, it said.
As a result, the countries underestimated how much non-recycled packaging was produced. Still, the resulting €1.1 billion revenue gap was compensated for elsewhere, the report stated.
The report concluded that the Commission must boost monitoring of countries’ data reporting and ensure that all 27 members use the same methodology and definitions.
In written responses, the Commission said it was “ready to take actions on the recommendations presented in the report as long as these actions remain within Commission’s competence and insofar they do not lead to additional unnecessary bureaucracy.”