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Having toughened its stance at home, France is leading the way on proposals to curb the adverse environmental impacts of the tobacco industry EU-wide, placing producers at the centre of the European debate.

 

Last week, Younous Omarjee, a French MEP from La France Insoumise (Unbowed France) party, published a report containing 10 suggestions aimed at reducing the influence of the tobacco lobby in the EU. The report, entitled ‘The Black Book of the tobacco industry in Europe’, exposes the influence that major tobacco exert over the EU Commission and suggests that the industry’s lobby has sheltered it from its responsibilities as a polluter of the environment.

 

Omarjee’s proposals come on the back of a toughening of the French government’s stance on the matter domestically – in April, Prime Minister Edouard Philippe announced plans to force the tobacco industry to participate in the country-wide clean-up of cigarette butts. But as the report infers, the power and influence of big tobacco at the EU Commission has served to prevent common sense, national initiatives of this type from seeing the light of day at the wider European level.

 

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With European Parliament elections on the horizon and the issue gaining purchase at national level, the proposals coming out of France are giving MEPs, anti-tobacco associations such as such as the Smoke Free Partnership (SFP) or the European Network for Smoking Prevention (ENSP) the impetus needed to place tobacco pollution at the centre of EU environmental policy. Doing so would provide a check on the power of lobbies at the Commission and signal a crucial victory over corporate sway for European environmentalism.

 

Tobacco figures are frightening: every year, over 6,000 billion cigarettes are smoked across the world. And a great proportion of cigarette butts are cast, in one fashion or another, into the natural environment. Butts are not just visual pollution – eyesores that soil our streets, our parks, our rivers, our forests, our mountains, and our beaches. Each butt constitutes a mini viral bomb containing some 4,000 chemicals and takes around 12 years to degrade and disappear. A single butt can pollute 500 litres of water or 1m3 of snow. For this reason, local and national public officials have strived in past decades to identify solutions for their disposal.

 

A potential solution seen in other industries is the ‘polluter-payer principle’, which aims to make companies accountable for their social responsibilities. It does so by compelling them to either find alternative solutions or pay fines for polluting the environment in which they exist. Across industries, money has often proven the most important and effective lever for encouraging corporate social responsibility.

 

In June, to this end, France’s Prime Minister Philippe instructed Brune Poirson, Secretary of State to the Minister for Ecological and Inclusive Transition, to convene tobacco manufacturers to discuss their participation in the recycling of cigarette butts. Poirson had previously voiced strong criticism of the industry: “it is intolerable that taxpayers pay to rid our environment of the waste from their [tobacco manufacturers] products”.

The counterargument is a tough one to make: French taxpayers, a majority of whom are non-smokers, should pay for the collection, processing and disposal of cigarette butts. And if this defence is difficult to make in France, the same surely applies to German, Greek, Swedish or Romanian taxpayers. To the extent that this is true, it would be logical for the European Commission to recommend proposals like that of Philippe’s to the European Parliament for discussion and implementation at the EU level. Its failure to do so, Omarjee’s report suggests, has more than a little to do with the Commission’s proximity to the tobacco lobby.

 

In spite of the Commission’s silence, Romanian MEP Cristian Busoi has involved a group of public health NGOs in discussions of a new general reform of tobacco policy at EU level through the proposal of a new tobacco products directive. The issue of pollution from cigarette butts figures among seven central topics requiring policy modernisation.

 

With European Parliament elections looming, MEPs, anti-smoking associations and environmental associations might do worse than to propose further initiatives of this sort going into the election cycle. In 2016, the Parliament successfully blocked the renewal of a Cooperation Agreement between the Commission and Philip Morris International. As an example of both the parliament’s clout and legitimacy, this victory must be capitalised upon – as the sovereign representative of national parliaments at the European level, the parliament must serve as the principal check and balance to the Commission’s power – and to that of its lobbies.

 

It is becoming clear that at a national level, the tobacco industry will soon have to reckon with the issue of pollution from its products. This is particularly true in France, where after hikes in cigarette prices and taxes paid by tobacco vendors, the Association For a New Anti-Tobacco Policy has recently proposed an “environmental contribution to cigarette butts at the sole expense of the manufacturers of tobacco”. Asking the tobacco companies to pay 0.15 cents per cigarette or 3 cents per packet sold would bring in €75 million each year. This is money that could be directly spent on recycling cigarette butts.

 

The debate has given rise to complementary initiatives across the country, such as in the city of Strasbourg – the official seat of the European Parliament – where smoking has recently been banned in city parks for this reason. Even the private sector wants a piece of the actions: MéGo, a company founded last year by a businessman in Brittany, collects and recycles cigarette butts from businesses up and down the country.

 

After the adoption of plain packaging and the decision to progressively bring cigarette prices prices up to €10 in 2020 under the impetus of President Emmanuel Macron, France is preparing to implement severe measures to force tobacco companies to shoulder the cost of cleaning up the environment. Let’s hope that the example is followed at European level, and possibly beyond, should the EU come to be considered as an example in this regard.

 

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