In Portugal, as in Spain, tobacco producers will start paying to clean up cigarette butts in public spaces.
Tobacco producers will now have to bear the costs of local councils cleaning up cigarette butts in public spaces. The news, carried by “Jornal de Notícias“, recalls that the proposal, inspired by a model implemented in Spain, is included in the State Budget for 2025 (OE2025).
In Portugal, the measure will specifically target the creation of an Integrated Tobacco Product Waste Management System, to which producers will have to adhere, thus assuming the costs associated with cleaning up cigarette butts and other tobacco product waste left in public spaces.
This measure was created as a way of taking more effective action, given the failure of the cigarette butt law, Law No. 88/2019, passed in 2019 and reinforced in 2021 with an increase in fines, and which aims to penalize those who throw “cigarette butts, cigars or other cigarettes into the environment” with fines ranging from 150 to 2,000 euros.
However, the impact has not been as expected: in the three years it has been in force, only 162 cases have resulted in fines, corresponding to a total value of around 16 thousand euros.
The exact amounts of this new contribution have not yet been released and the Environment Ministry has promised more information soon.
Marta Cerqueira is from Minho and a vegetarian. Luckily, she lives in Lisbon, where there is more tofu than sarrabulho. She has been a journalist for over 15 years, the last of which writing about food and sustainability. Now, out of the newsroom, she continues to write whenever she can, be it in magazines, journals, post its, or on her Instagram page, which she uses to share a life divided between being a mom-person-foodie-traveler. Still, she created Peggada so she could write about what doesn't fit in a magazine, journal, post it or Instagram: a better world.
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