Butting Out: A New €68 Fine in Paris for Tossing Cigarettes
Paris is a city of smokers. Almost all restaurants, brasseries, and cafes have outside seating with ashtrays for their smoking patrons.The tabac shops are usually open even when nothing else is. Even price hikes don't seem to stop Parisians from buying cigarettes.
This is all well and good -- until those cigarette butts start landing on the pavement. Total damage: 350 tons of cigarette butts a year.
(Photo: Slackluster.com)
As reported in The Plume, the city is finally saying enough is enough. If you toss a butt on the ground, you could be fined €68. The fine came into effect on Oct. 1.
According to France24, the new €68 fine is part of campaign to clean up the streets of Paris. The city has been warning smokers for months. News of the fine has been around since January. In the spring, Paris set up over 30,000 new litterbins equipped with cigarette extinguishers and distributed 15,000 free pocket ashtrays over the summer. When that didn’t work, city officials tried to drive the message home by handing out fake fines to offending smokers. They had actual police officers on the streets handing out fake citations for cigarette butts hoping that it would make a lasting impact on the smokers in the city.
As I said, this is part of the wider effort to clean up Paris. So not only will cigarette smokers be fined for tossing their butts on the ground, but also dog walkers will have to pay €68 fines for not cleaning up dog poop -- another major problem in Paris. Parisians love dogs, but few of them seem to clean up after them.
So what does all this mean for Parisian smokers? How do they avoid the fines? It’s really very simple… When you are done smoking your cigarette, try to find one of the 30,000 available ashtrays the city has set up over the past few months. If you cannot find an ashtray, simply put out the cigarette completely and make sure there is no more smoldering ash or smoke coming out before throwing it in a nearby garbage can.
Now you can’t say you didn’t know. You don’t want to pay €68 simply because you are too lazy to find a trash can do you? Keep Paris beautiful and save yourself some money.
