Cigarette butts: since 5 January 2023 the clean-up was the tobacco producers' job, the regulation arrives only now and meanwhile the waste tax pays for it

4 October 2026, 18:52

In recent days Italy's Ministry of the Environment has put out for consultation, until 31 October, the draft regulation obliging producers of filter cigarettes to pay for handling cigarette butts: collection, transport, disposal, awareness campaigns, and cleaning the streets and squares where the filters end up. The targets: collect at least half of the butts, by weight, by 31 December 2035, and 70 per cent by 2040. How much the producers will pay will be set later by an agreement with the municipalities.

Then the dates. The European directive 2019/904, the one on single-use plastics, wanted that system up and running for cigarette filters by 5 January 2023. Italy transposed it with Legislative Decree 196 of 2021. The regulation that makes it work is out for consultation now, almost four years after the deadline.

The directive is precise: those who sell cigarettes must also cover "the costs of cleaning up litter resulting from those products". Until the regulation exists, those butts are removed by the municipalities with their street sweepers, and the cost goes into the bill for the waste service, that is, into the TARI, Italy's local waste tax. It is paid by households and businesses, smokers and non-smokers alike. An office where nobody smokes pays by the square metre like everyone else.

The producers, meanwhile, set up a consortium in 2022, Erion Care, which funds awareness campaigns and the occasional clean-up. It is also the source of the most quoted figure on the subject: in Italy more than six in ten cigarettes smoked in public places end up where they should not.

It is the neighbour's barbecue in the courtyard of the block of flats. Plates and cups are left on the grass, the cleaning firm comes on Monday, and the invoice is split among all the residents. The neighbour, for his part, has bought a pack of black bin bags and put up a notice calling for tidiness.

The cigarette butts, though, are the symptom. The disease is a way of transposing European rules: the law gets written, the decree that makes it work arrives years later, and in the meantime the cost stays where Europe had said to remove it from. A cigarette filter takes years to disappear from the pavement. The regulation meant to have it collected, it seems, does too.

The question goes to the Ministry of the Environment. The clean-up that since 5 January 2023 was the producers' job, and which the municipalities have paid for in the meantime through the TARI: will anyone pay it back, or does the producers' bill start on the day the regulation is signed?

Europe had addressed the bill to those who sell cigarettes. For almost four years it has been paid by those who pay the waste tax.

This article was prompted by a news item published in Il Sole 24 Ore on 2 October 2026.