A number of associations of national producers on June 29 mounted a protest in front of the Parliament Building entitled “Illogical ecological tax!” where they expressed their dissatisfaction with the gradual diminution of the ecological tax for importers, IPN reports.

Vitalie Krupenenkov, the representative of the Association of Producers and Importers of Packing and Packed Goods, said they decided to stage the protest after the competent parliamentary commission discussed the bill to reduce the ecological tax for some categories of products in non-degradable or hardly degradable packing. On the one hand, this change would causer losses of millions of lei to the Ecological Fund. On the other hand, it would discriminate against the national producers because these will not be exempted from import taxes on packing.

He also said that the MPs suggest refunding the money paid into the Ecological Fund to importers until the law takes effect. This way the budget will lose about 100 million lei. The national producers disagree as they consider this money should be used to build and outfit waste recycling and processing points.

The national producers demand that the ecological tax should remain unchanged and that the money should be used to optimize the system for collecting and recycling plastic and other dangerous packing.

The diminution of the ecological tax for plastic, composite, polyethylene and other types of packing is stipulated in the bill to amend the Law on the Tax for Environmental Pollution that was adopted in two readings in Parliament, but wasn’t promulgated by the President and was sent back to the parliamentary commissions.