The government decided to postpone the increase in environmental tax

Discussion of the recycling payment reform is postponed until the fourth quarter of 2020, an employee of the presidential administration told Vedomosti and confirmed the representative of the profile vice-premier Victoria Abramchenko.

On the instructions of President Vladimir Putin, officials had to prepare the concept of the reform of extended producer responsibility (ROP) by the end of March. The Ministry of Natural Resources sent the concept to the government, but Abramchenko received a letter from the president’s administration asking him to postpone the review deadlines to the end of 2020, the Vedomosti interlocutor said. The Vice Prime Minister wants to work out the concept in detail, to calculate the economy of the industry by connecting the Ministry of Industry and Trade and the Ministry of Agriculture to the discussion, explains a person close to Abramchenko’s apparatus. Because of the crisis, reform will have to be postponed, the official says, but the imbalance between the payments of the population and companies will not be eliminated soon. In 2019, companies paid 100 times less for garbage collection and disposal than people (2.6 billion and 200 billion rubles, respectively), he says.

The reform was to attract money to the waste processing industry. In the Ecology national project, the share of waste sent for sorting should increase from 7% in 2018 to 60% in 2024. The share of waste sent for processing (or incineration) is from 3 to 36%.

Now manufacturers must either dispose of a part (on average 15%) of goods and packaging (these are 54 groups, which include linen, clothes, tires, electronics, newspapers, etc.), or pay an environmental fee. But the mechanism does not work yet, wrote Minister of Nature Dmitry Kobylkin in a letter to the government. Of the 160,000 companies in 2019, slightly more than 15,000 reported on recycling. It is also not possible to effectively organize the environmental tax. In the budget for 2020, the forecast for revenues was halved (to 2.8 billion rubles), and in 2021 - from 8 billion to 3.8 billion rubles.

The authorities discussed a sharp increase in recycling standards - up to 100%, as well as the abolition of self-disposal of waste products and packaging. This was to raise fees to 136 billion rubles. per year, estimated the Ministry of Natural Resources. In this case, the administration of the fee was proposed to be transferred to the Federal Tax Service. Her representative did not respond to the request.

The fact that the Ministry of Natural Resources proposed postponing the reform until the end of 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic, Kommersant previously wrote. The Ministry of Natural Resources suggested postponing the time so as not to increase the burden on business and the population in a difficult socio-economic situation, says a federal official. Another reason is Abramchenko’s dissatisfaction with the quality of the concept, a close interlocutor knows. Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin and Minister of Industry and Trade Denis Manturov asks Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin to introduce a moratorium on all additional regulatory measures, including postponing environmental and recycling fees, and not extend the extended responsibility of the manufacturer to consumers (TASS reports citing the letter from the Minister )

A business that is affected by the new rules supports deferral. The concept under discussion suggests that either part of the business or the population will have to pay extra, explains Konstantin Rzayev, chairman of the board of directors of Ecotechnology Group of Companies. Now, to put it mildly, at the wrong time, he said. The concept needs to be seriously developed into a balanced version, he urges, but now this is not the main priority, it is better not to hastily accept the crude version of the concept, but to postpone its adoption. It is necessary to work out the document in a quality manner, if they do so, it will mean that the business’s arguments have been heard, agrees the Executive Director of RusPEK (unites manufacturers of goods and packaging) Lyubov Melanevskaya.

The reform was supposed to ensure the growth in funding needed to increase processing capacities, says Alexander Kogan, an expert at the Ecology Foundation's ONF site. The new industry has no other sources of financing - operators in 50 regions received a tariff without an investment component. There were high hopes for the growth of environmental tax revenues and their allocation to co-finance the construction of the necessary infrastructure, which they now want to postpone, he complains.

The representative of the Ministry of Natural Resources did not respond to a request from Vedomosti.

Source: https://www.vedomosti.ru/