The Republika Srpska parliament adopted a law on amendments to the law on waste management. The law was adopted under emergency proceedings. The goal of the law is to set norms for coefficients and goals in calculating fees for the polluters who dump packaging waste. The fees will be collected from whoever dumps the waste polluting the environment.

The fees are paid into the Republika Srpska public income budget account and are then transferred to the RS Environmental Protection and Energy Efficiency Fund. The collected funds are used for managing packaging waste and to control and record the companies and individuals registered with the packaging waste management system.

The new law also defines the drafting and adopting of a Republika Srpska waste management plan in line with the European Parliament and European union Council’s Directive 2008/98 of December 19, 2008 on waste and the annulling of other directives.

“The adopting of this law creates conditions to use the available grants from Sweden to draft the plan which will order the waste management system in the Republika Srpska in line with the goals defined in the Waste Management Strategy for the 2017-2026 period, the Republika Srpska government said in its statement.

Constitutional Court Ruling

The Republika Srpska Constitutional Court ruled in December 2017 that some articles of the Law on Waste Management were unconstitutional as were the decisions on coefficients to calculate fees for packaging waste dumping and the goals in managing packaging and packaging waste in the 2015-2016 period.

“The Constitutional Court ruled that the issues covering the fees, which are a public income, cannot fall within the jurisdiction of the RS government because this is not a question of implementing the law but fundamental issues which determine the level of the fees and which have to be regulated by parliament,” the Constitutional Court ruled.