Casablanca Introduces New Waste Collection Tax for Hotels and Restaurants

No more free collection of waste produced by hotels and snacks. From now on, the owners of these establishments must pay a tax of 500 DH per ton of waste produced, reports Challenge. At the origin of this fiscal decision, the financial losses recorded by the municipality due to the non-payment of compensation by these establishments. Until now, it is the municipality that manages the collection of waste alone.

"There are well-known snacks in Casablanca that do fast food that do nothing for the municipality, which incurs financial losses to the latter, which finds itself obliged to manage these large quantities of waste on a daily basis in order to preserve the cleanliness expected by the people of Casablanca," said the deputy mayor in a press release. "It is no longer acceptable that the people of Casablanca pay the tax for these establishments that produce waste," he added, confirming that it has been decided to force them to pay an amount of 500 dirhams per ton of waste, through the two household waste management companies, to transfer it to the city’s landfill.

This fiscal decision is already provoking reactions. Noureddine Al-Harraq, president of the National Association of Café and Restaurant Owners, opposes it. "As a national association and as professionals, we were shocked by this decision taken by the city of Casablanca and a number of municipalities in different regions of the kingdom, all the more so as it comes at a time when we were expecting the government to take support measures for our sector seriously affected by the two Covid years. This denotes the inability of these authorities to broaden the tax base and opt for easy solutions, including the imposition of catering entities that are already heavily taxed," he was outraged on Radio MFM.