It seems incredible, but each year smokers here in France throw 30 billion butts on to this country’s sidewalks, parks and beaches.

If one sets them out they will form a string that will go around our Mother Earth 22 times.

As for Paris, here, half a million butts are thrown down on our sidewalks. If gathered together they will cover 9 sq.km (4 sq.m). Or they will fill 25 of Paris’s public transport buses.

To get rid of the butts Paris’s socialist mayor Bertrand Delanoë is to install 10,000 special butt bins this month.  He has furthermore asked France’s minister of the interior Manuel Valls to increase the current €35 ($45 / £28) fine for throwing a butt on to a sidewalk to €68 ($87 / £52).

The fine’s the same if you allow your little (and not so little) pooch to leave his previous night’s supper on a sidewalk.

As Monsieur François Dagnaud of Paris’s city hall told the Paris daily Le Parisien on Wednesday, October 31, in Paris alone 315 tonnes of cigarettes are smoked annually. “We reckon that the butts of half of these are thrown down on the ground,” he said.

City Hall liaised with Paris’s individual mayors to learn where the most butt polluted places in the capital are and the 10,000 butt bins will be attached to the garbage bins in those places.

To finance this placing of butt bins City Hall has called on cigarette companies to step in and to put their hands in their pockets.

Smoking in public places was banned five years ago. By public places it was meant bistros, restaurants, night clubs, bars, offices, banks, post offices and hospitals, but not however streets, parks and beaches.