How does a Maltese person know that it's a new year?
New taxes, that's how.
In the November Budget, as usual we got slapped with more taxes, taxes, taxes i.e. higher prices. Some of it was "effective as of January 1st 2005" but in the meantime I forgot about some of them...
Last Sunday, I got the bus to church because Mike was working. It was the 2nd of January. The bus driver charged me 20 cents instead of 15, and I asked him why because I thought he'd made a mistake. He insisted that he was right, and then said "They raised the cost - don't you watch television?" LOL. I had even blogged about it, but forgot.
Yesterday I remembered another thing that I'd forgotten about the buses - the new increase in price doesn't apply to students or to the elderly. So when I got the bus to camp after school, I asked the bus driver before I paid, "Does the increase apply to students?". He explained to me that in this case, "students" only covers children from Kindergarten to Secondary school - anyone who is in tertiary education, and this includes sixth form, must pay the increase.
Before, for Lm1 I could get almost 7 bus rides (at 15 cents each). Now, the same amount only gets me 5. It's not so bad for me because I walk to school, but Little Sis has to get 4 buses a day (two to school, two home) so instead of 60 cents a day, that's now 80 cents, or an extra Lm1 a week. Meh.
Today The Times has a story on another tax - the 'eco-contribution', as it's called. I'm not linking to the story because the Times only leaves their stuff up for a month.
Anyway, I studied waste management last year as part of Environmental Engineering, and I was actually taught by the head of WasteServ, Dr. Chris Ciantar, who has a PhD in it. So I know quite a lot about the reasons/implications etc of waste management (it's actually quite interesting).
Of course as always, there's two sides to the issue: on the Government's side, they want people to cut down on waste. The main reason is that the Government is paying through the nose to process waste (specially plastic) so the fair thing is for the people who actually generate the waste to pay for its processing. That's the real reason for the eco-contribution (as usual it's the money). The secondary reason is to cut down on waste in the first place - this is the first principle of waste management. Less waste means less processing costs, less depletion of resources, and (yay) less environmental damage.
On the other side, the side of the manufacturer/retailer/consumer, no-one likes to have to pay more money for anything. Duh.
The taxes have been set based on, it seems, how hard it is to process the waste.
This leads to great discrepancies between items, but that's because organic/biodegradable waste is very easy to process, metal and similar items are harder, but plastic is the absolute worst. That's why the plastics have been hit very hard.
For instance, the tax on a water heater is Lm3, a dishwasher is Lm10, and an airconditioner is Lm12, but on 1 kilogram of plastic bags it's Lm10.76. You would use each of the first three for several years, and usually you'd only actually use a plastic bag for a few hours, but the plastic is much harder to process.
The plastic bags only cost 3 mils to manufacture, so for 1 cent you get 3 bags plus 1 mil in change! But to process that plastic bag as waste costs a lot more, so now you have to pay another 5 cents and 2 mils for that.
Looking at it from the outside, it's outrageous to put a tax of more than 1700% on an item, but if you look at it from the inside, it's justified because of the processing costs.
Most times when taxes go up, it's so the Government can get more money from us, for instance when the cigarettes go up, or VAT, etc. But in this case, it's to pay for the real cost of consuming certain things.
When you look at this from an environmental viewpoint, it's great news :-) You can tell people about recyling and reusing until you're blue in the face, but most people only care about one thing: money! So the best way to make people take better care of the environment is to ensure that it hurts them financially when they don't. Heheheheh.
Of course, I don't know how WasteServ chose the figures for the eco-contribution, nor can I tell how much of this tax WILL actually go to the waste processing and how much will be siphoned of for other purposes... but the intention was good.
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