The Council of Ministers has adopted a bill that implements the provisions of the Plastics Directive into the Polish legal order. This is probably related to the pressure from the European Commission to adopt the aforementioned regulations as soon as possible, which should come into force from July 2021.
The draft will then be submitted to the Sejm and will be considered during the next session of the parliament. Originally, the vast majority of the draft was to enter into force on January 1, 2023, but it is already known that this date will not be met. Since this is a complex regulation, it can be assumed that the act will enter into force either in the middle of next year or from January 1, 2024.
According to the draft, retail and wholesale units as well as catering establishments will be required to pay a special fee on selected single-use plastic packaging. The settlement of this fee will take place on an annual basis after the submission of the relevant report. Unfortunately, there is no exact list of goods/packages that are covered by these regulations since the appendix to the draft act introduces only categories of packaging. And so these are: cups for drinks and containers for meals. At the same time, the Ministry of Climate and Environment stressed that there will be no additional guidelines on what will be covered by the new fee due to the official guidelines of the European Commission, which also do not provide precise guidelines on how to approach this. These guidelines only indicate certain categories, such as a container containing snacks such as crackers or containing sauces such as mustard or ketchup). The failure to pay the fee in the correct amount will create a risk of imposing a 50% sanction, which will be charged on the correct amount that should be paid. A similar mechanism already operates in the sugar tax.
On the other hand, producers and entities importing selected products in plastic packaging will be required to pay a new annual fee related to the management of waste generated from such packaging.
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