Recycling plan aims to stub out cigarette littering

In a move that could provide some income for homeless people and clean up the streets, the Catalan government is looking at paying €4 ($4.25) to anyone who hands in a pack's-worth of cigarette ends at a recycling point.

- Stephen Burgen

The cost of the proposal would be covered by a 20-cent levy on each cigarette, its proponents say, which would nearly double the price of a pack from about €5.

A similar levy on plastic bottles and aluminium cans introduced in New York City in 1982 has provided homeless people with a small but steady income.

"We want to put a stop to the present situation where around 70% of cigarette butts end up either on the ground or in the sea," Isaac Peraire, the head of the Catalan waste agency, told El Periódico last week.

According to the EU, cigarette butts are the second most common single-use plastic found on European beaches and environmental organisation Ocean Conservancy says of all the rubbish thrown into the sea, butts are the most numerous.

In an effort to limit marine pollution, smoking will be banned on all of Barcelona's city beaches from July. Spain's Socialist-led coalition government is also planning to overhaul the country's smoking laws to make it illegal to light upon the outside terraces of bars and restaurants, on beaches, and at openair sports venues.

According to figures from 2019, 19.7% of Spaniards smoke on a daily basis, slightly above the EU average of 18.4%. The highest rates of smoking in the EU are in Bulgaria (28.7%), Greece (23.6%) and Latvia (22.1%).