International Review of Waste Management Policy - Department of ...

In 1996, the Danish Parliament required the Government to again examine
possibilities for the introduction of a tax. 598 The Government completed a review at
the end of 1997, which recommended that:
502
� The tax should seek to reduce the weight of packaging for each particular
material;
� The tax should be based on a life cycle assessment of environmental impacts
in order to promote the most environmentally friendly materials;
� The tax should be based on weight of packaging and be differentiated by
material; and
� For ease of administration, only the heaviest product groups should be
included, and it should be easy to distinguish the products and packaging on
which the tax is imposed;
Following the review, these findings were utilised in the framework for the levy in
Denmark.
In the Netherlands, two studies were used to assess the potential tax rates:
• First, in 2007, approximate calculations were carried out by CE Delft for the
Ministry of Finance on environmental differentiation of the packaging on a limited
number of product groups. Some of the environmental data used in that study for
the materials in question were outdated;
• Second, again in 2007, with the decision having been taken to use the tax to
cover all packaging, a second study was prepared though with only limited
differentiation as to material subcategories (to keep things compatible with
the existing Dutch monitoring system for packaging materials) It was known
that the plan was to levy the packaging tax as a surcharge per kilo of
packaging material. 599
28.5 Environmental Benefits
The use of life cycle assessment has been used by both Denmark and the
Netherlands to seek to link the packaging taxes to a measure of environmental
impacts. In principle, basing a tax on these grounds ought – if the analysis is robust
over time – to make evaluation of impacts simple. In principle, one would like to see
revenues decline, or at least to see the trend in any revenue increase which would
have occurred had the tax been applied earlier, reduced.
From 1997 to 2001 packaging waste generation in Denmark only grew 2%, as
opposed to the 8.4% rate for the EU-15, and against a backdrop of GDP growth in the
598 Ibid.
599 CE Delft (2007) Environmental Indices for the Dutch Packaging Tax, Delft: CE Delft, November
2007.
29/09/09