Brussels (Brussels Morning Newspaper) – Politician Jeroen Van Loy wants tobacco companies to pay for cleaning cigarette butts. Jo Brouns supports reviving Zuhal Demir’s plan to charge them €25.5M. In 2024, 6,000 littering fines were issued, mostly for cigarette butts.
A politician named Jeroen Van Loy is worried about cigarette butts littering the streets. Another politician, Jo Brouns, said that having small ashtrays people can carry could help. Van Loy thinks that’s not enough and wants the tobacco companies to pay for cleaning up cigarette butts.
A different politician, Zuhal Demir, had a plan for that. She wanted cigarette companies to pay 25.5 million euros to help clean up all the trash in Flanders, which costs over 150 million euros every year.
She mentioned that cigarette butts are bad for the environment because they have tiny pieces of plastic and take a long time to go away. Brouns said he’s going to bring back that plan and talk to the tobacco companies about it. This is like a rule that says companies have to take care of the trash their products make.
The tobacco producers will certainly be included,
according to Brouns.
How can cigarette litter be reduced effectively?
Van Loy is happy that Brouns wants to make the tobacco companies pay for cleaning up cigarette butts. He says it’s not fair that taxpayers have to pay for that when the companies make a lot of money from cigarettes. He wants the companies to pay the whole cost.
He mentioned that England is doing something similar, where they are trying to make tobacco companies pay for all the cigarette butts that get thrown away. Governments want to make sure that companies that pollute have to clean up after themselves.
In 2024, over 6,000 people were caught littering confirmed by the Flemish Public Waste Agency (OVAM). The number of fines for littering has gone up a lot since 2020. Antwerp is the city that gives out the most fines (6,309). The government says this shows they are taking the problem seriously. But even with more fines, people still drop trash, especially cigarette butts.
That is an impressive increase in the number of GAS fines,
said Minister Brouns.
According to Brouns, many smokers don’t think cigarette butts are trash, but they are really bad for the environment. They have plastic and chemicals that can affect the soil and water. It takes a long time for cigarette butts to break down, and they make the environment sick.
The government is trying to make people stop littering by putting out ashtrays, telling people about the problem, and sending secret officers to catch people. But it’s hard to change how people act. They mentioned that cities need to keep telling people about the harm cigarette butts cause and how to throw them away properly.
