Labour urges multi-participation in waste packaging schemes
The Malta Labour Party yesterday welcomed the Chamber of Small and Medium Enterprises (GRTU)’s involvement in the waste packaging sector, arguing that multi-participation is the way forward.
Labour’s spokesman for the environment Leo Brincat, together with the spokesman for small businesses Gavin Gulia, yesterday met GRTU director Vince Farrugia and Joe Attard, CEO of the chamber’s subsidiary green dot at the GRTU offices in Valletta.
“I welcomed the GRTU’s decision to be advised by a supervisory committee comprised of members from relevant business sectors, as well as the local councils as well as their company’s commitment to collect money from businesses to take care of their environmental responsibilities, including collection and recycling,” Brincat said yesterday.
Contacted by MaltaToday, Brincat outlined the MLP’s basic position on waste packaging.
“We would like to see a system that can take on board the majority of local producers and importers in order to ensure that Malta will have as many direct participants in and ‘beneficiaries’ from the Waste Packaging Compliance Scheme,” he aid. “We feel that any such set up should have strict compliance standards, and an effective audit trail that will make verification procedures easy to activate and sustain.”
The MLP also criticised the delays in implementing the necessary directives.
“We also hope that the time lag since we joined the EU, when waste packaging data actually started being collected professionally, is totally unacceptable both in terms of conformity with EU norms but also because it is in the national interest to have such data in hand,” Brincat said. “It is totally unacceptable that years went by without either ourselves or Eurostat having any statistics to show how much packaging waste was re-used or recycled in the past three years.”
“Did we have to await a wake up call from Brussels to start doing so? Was it not humiliating for government to have to turn to a leading international advisory firm to carry out a subcontracted job of collecting data on government’s behalf for the period 2005-2007?”
Brincat pointed out that Malta was by this year obliged to recover a substantial amount of our packaging waste and to recycle a quarter of it.
“But did we?” he asked. “It is even more worrying that the last available data dates back to 2004, when only 5% of Malta’s packaging waste was recovered from a 27% target set by the packaging directive. Our achieved figures for recycling then were less than a quarter of the target that they should have reached.
The Labour Party’s meeting with Greendot yesterday follows on the heels of a recent meeting with the only other operator in the area of waste packaging, Greenpak.
“I will not be drawn into which of the two companies is the better equipped to run the show or not; but ideally, although market forces do not always operate as they should on this island arguably because of the size of the island. I personally feel that competition should always be considered healthy.
“If the days are long overdue when state monopolies should deservedly be dead and buried, I feel that these should not be replaced by private monopolies. But on the other hand one must ensure that all field players operate professionally, and rise up to accepted and expected established norms.”
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