Currently, over 90% of the cigarettes sold in Korea are manufactured using plastic as raw material for the filter.

Approximately 3.2 billion packs (64 billion cigarettes) of cigarettes are consumed in Korea every year. It is estimated that two-thirds of them (approximately 42 billion cigarettes) are thrown away carelessly into drains, etc. Cigarette butts like these flow into rivers and the ocean, and during this process, the plastic in the filter is degraded into microplastic, causing marine pollution. Ocean Conservancy, an international environmental organization that has been collecting trash from coasts all over the world for the last 32 years, revealed that a third of the marine litter is cigarette butts, demonstrating the severity of the environmental destruction by cigarette butts on a global scale.

In this context, the cigarette butt has been an actively debated subject in developed countries. For instance, in 2018 the European Parliament discussed regulations to reduce plastic-containing cigarette filters by 50% by 2025, by 80% by 2030, etc. However, in Korea such measures are nonexistent.

Hence, making the manufacturers use cigarette filters that comply with the criteria prescribed by Presidential Decree to reduce the use of plastic will help prevent environmental destruction by plastic (Article 25-6 newly inserted).