If you look at your water bill you will see that every month you are charged a fee for the management of Urban Solid Waste (MSW). A tax that is calculated not based on the waste you produce or the recycling you carry out, but which varies depending on the cubic meters of water you use.
Supposedly, from 2026 onwards, this fee should be de-indexed from water consumption. But the measure was postponed until 2030 for domestic consumers. For commerce, restaurants and services, it will have to come into force on January 1st of next year.
DECO talks about setbacks and bad news for consumers
The diploma on waste management, published yesterday in Diário da República, postpones the entry into force of a measure that had been awaited for a long time, namely by DECO PROteste which calls for a fairer waste tariff calculation system, instead of a blind tax that does not encourage people’s good behavior in the production and management of waste.
“There is a setback here. Not good news for consumers. We will continue in this situation of some injustice”, says Susana Correia, lawyer at DECO
Polluter/pays principle
O PAYT system, an acronym in English for “pay as you throw”, which in a free translation means something like “pay according to what you throw away”, already exists in Portugal. But only in 7 of the 308 municipalities.
One of them is Maia, where the tariff for the urban waste management service, paid monthly by end users, is no longer indexed to water consumption, but is now calculated based on the amount of undifferentiated waste collected.
