Disposing of discarded cigarette butts on the streets costs a lot of money. Now France wants to make manufacturers responsible.
Paris – Many French people carelessly snap their cigarettes away, with 23.5 billion butts ending up on the streets and in nature every year. The Ministry of the Environment in Paris is now declaring war on this bad habit by making manufacturers responsible.
A recycling and anti-waste law passed last year requires them to take care of the whereabouts of their products after their “end of life”. Specifically, the tobacco industry is to contribute 80 million euros per year to the elimination of the butts and to awareness-raising campaigns.
The ministry has a specific goal in mind: within six years, the flood should shrink by at least 40 percent. This should also be achieved by distributing pocket ashtrays, more pure cigarette rubbish bins and new collection and recycling systems for the “Mégots”, as the cigarette butts are colloquially known in French. A new eco-institution is supposed to allocate money to local authorities on request for corresponding projects.
According to the latest EU statistics, the proportion of smokers in France is 22.4 percent of the population. In Germany, 15.9 percent smoke. And here, too, discarded butts cause disposal costs of around 225 million euros annually, as the Association of Municipal Enterprises (VKU) announced in Berlin.
From 2023, the manufacturers of certain single-use products such as cigarette butts would also have to pay financially for the consequences of their environmentally harmful business models, said a VKU spokesman. This ensures more fairness in the distribution of cleaning and disposal costs. dpa
