"We're going to require the tobacco companies to start contributing towards the cost of the cigarette butt litter that we're finding all over the ground," he told RTÉ news."For a long time we've had cigarette butts just cast aside and then you have a big cost to the councils and also a lot of volunteer work going in to collecting this litter, taking it away, and what we haven't done is actually charge the cigarette companies for that."He said the money charged to the cigarette companies would be divided as to market share and will be used to collect the litter itself as well as collecting data and communicating with the public.He said over the course of the next year the government would be measuring how many cigarette butts are on the ground as part of the National Littering Pollution Monitoring System which recently found that almost half of all litter was cigarette-related."Even when you look at the ground in a tidy place like Dun Laoghaire which is one of the tidiest towns in Ireland, ranks very highly, but when you look carefully at the ground you'll see there are just cigarette butts everywhere and its an endless task trying to pick them up.""