Households could be left to pick up the bill for the government’s decision to abolish a tax on plastic packaging in its revised budget plans.

Green growth minister Sophie Hermans included a “circular levy” on polymers, a type of synthetic packaging material, in the coalition government’s programme in July to encourage companies to use more sustainable alternative.

But the plan was dropped from the latest version of Hermans’ climate plans, announced last Friday. It was one of several concessions to industry, which warned that the extra costs could damage the Netherlands’ competitiveness.

The €567 million that the levy had been expected to bring in will now have to be raised from other sources, as the income is already included in the government’s budget calculations.

Some of the losses will be compensated through another levy on CO2 emissions, but the rest will have to be raised by local government, who are responsible for waste collection.

The industry body for waste and sanitation services NVRD said councils would probably have to reclaim the cost from households through the local tax for bin collections.

Industry lobbying

Wendy de Wild, director of the NVRD, told NOS that industrial players had held sway in talks to reform the levy, while recyclers and local authorities were under-represented.

She said that unless a new round of talks on plastics took place, “the costs will be passed on to waste processors and municipalities, who will most probably pass them on in turn through the domestic waste levy. That’s a bad idea, because it’s not where the responsibility lies.”

Boris Schellekens, a researcher with the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO), said the best way to reduce plastic pollution was to tax industrial users rather than manufacturers or consumers.

“The biggest quantities of plastic are in packaging and construction, so we should be taxing distributors, producers and importers of plastic, like they do in Spain,” he said.

“Through the shredder”

The economic planning agency PBL cut the chances of the government meeting its legal climate change targets by 2030 to 5 per cent after Hermans revised her department’s plans.

Geert Wilders, leader of the far-right PVV, the largest party in the coalition, noted approvingly last week that the spring budget negotiations had produced “no new climate and nitrogen policy”.

Wilders has frequently denounced “climate hobbies” as a waste of money and pledged during the last election campaign to put the previous government’s energy transition policies “through the shredder”.