EU plastics levy: new report highlights difficult start

The European Court of Auditors (ECA) has published a new report evaluating the EU’s plastics levy.

This “plastic levy” is designed to reduce the spread of non-recycled plastic waste, while funding the 2021–2027 EU budget against the backdrop of the increased spending arising from the pandemic.

Each Member State is required to pay a levy of €0.80 per kilogramme of non-recycled plastic packaging waste.

According to the ECA’s assessment, Member States were insufficiently prepared for the implementation of the new approach and the data used for the assessment lacked comparability and reliability.

In 2023, the plastics levy generated €7.2 billion, representing 4% of the EU’s total revenue.

The audit highlights several key areas for improvement in the levy calculation process and makes recommendations to the European Commission for the management of future own resources.

Among the ECA’s main concerns are the lack of preparedness of Member States and delays in the Commission’s actions to monitor and support the implementation of the levy.

In addition, the report highlights that the data used to allocate resources was not sufficiently robust, which affected the assessment of the recycling targets set under the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR).

The ECA recommends that the Commission uses these findings to improve the comparability and reliability of data, while addressing the risk of waste being misclassified as recycled.

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