Plastic Bag Levy: A Case Study

now producing alternative durable or reusable shopping bags from recycled material. Consumers are now driven to reuse shopping plastic bags and or buy the durable reusable shopping bags. The objective the Plastic bag levy was to serve to generate funding for the creation of a recycling company, which would collect and recycle the plastic carrier bags. This recycle entity is now in operation including other private owned plastic recycling companies who took up the opportunity and thus, employment has been created, as they are now companies taking up the opportunity to recycle all, the shopping plastics or producing alternative and cost effective plastic bags form non-synthetic fibers. Knowler (2008) reports that, following the levying of a charge

These are some for the barriers and competitiveness issues which environmental regulation, taxes and policies encounter with the respective stakeholders during policy making and during policy implementation. Therefore, a balanced approach has to be achieved; and not to focus on avoiding environment damage only, while destroying industries and forgoing the opportunity of economic growth which creates tax base for government’s revenues. The policy or package will also have to guarantee that the polluter is charged or taxed accordingly and not the affected society at large to be bore the environmental damaging costs.

According to Green Fiscal Commission 2009, there are two criteria’s which can be used to assess the effectiveness of environment taxes. The first criterion directly attempts to trace the contribution of the tax to the monitored pollution reduction, whilst the second criterion endeavors to establish incentives for the taxpayer to change their behavior in a way more favorable to the environment often by adopting abatement measures or by saving on scarce

According to National Treasury 2013, the cost of this pollution is still not reflected in the final prices of the goods and services and the tax payers bore the costs of pollution or damage on the environments and thus distorting labour and income taxes. Other environmental taxes introduced before like Plastic bags levy, Fuel tax and light bulb levy can be used to motivate Carbon emission producers to why Carbon tax can have double benefits. If carbon tax is introduced and implemented like other environment taxes discussed (Plastic bag levy and Light bulb levy) they would yield two or three