Más País Verdes Equo, Spain’s Green Party, proposes to ban smoking on the beaches in Spain. ‘The sand is not an ashtray”, is the argument, although many people on Spanish beaaches seem to think otherwise.
“More than 30,000 million cigarettes are consumed in Spain and 15% of the filters end up on the beach”, say the Green Party. They add, “cigarette butts take ten years to break down and can be swallowed by animals in the process”. In addition, according to the party, the remains of cigarettes constitute 40% of the waste of the Mediterranean.
Bill – Waste and Contaminated Soil
These observations are contained in one of the 27 articles of the Waste and Contaminated Land Bill. This is currently being discussed in Parliament.
End of disposable society
With this law, the party also aims to put an end to the ‘throw-away society’ by focusing on “extending the life of the products” through repair and replacement of parts. According to Más País-Verdes Equo, the current model is “buy, throw away, buy unsustainable”. Therefore, the party proposes “to carry out a study” on the useful life of the products”. The results would be made “public and easily accessible so that consumers can consult it in choosing the most sustainable products”.
Read: How to go green in Spain
New recycling model
Likewise, through the bill, the party is calling for a new “recycling model in Spain” as the current system is “highly ineffective” as “44% of Spain’s plastic ends up in landfills”.
To reverse this trend, PSOE and Unidas Podemos proposed the introduction of a packaging return system. A similar system is already in use in Sweden, Germany, Norway, Denmark, Canada and the United States. The consumer will then receive a small compensation for each returned product; a kind of deposit.
Discarded food
The Green party also wants to emphasise that discarded food accounts for 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions. To counter this, the proposal is that supermarkets and other parties in the food chains cannot throw away good food. Instead, they would be made to “donate them to soup kitchens, food banks or NGOs” through the state’s Waste Prevention Plan.
