A Cafe With an Esplanade Would Sweep Five Metres of Pavement Instead of Two Under Lisbon's Draft Waste Rules, and the Minimum Fine Rises to 90 Euros

If you run a café with tables on the pavement anywhere in Lisbon, the strip of street you are legally responsible for sweeping is about to grow from two metres to five. That is the single most concrete change in the draft waste and urban hygiene regulation the Lisbon city executive approved on Wednesday, and it is the one that will be felt fastest, because the rule it replaces has been in force since the last day of 2019 and almost nobody outside the trade knows it exists.

The proposal, brought by councillor Joana Baptista, passed with the votes of the PSD, Iniciativa Liberal, CDS and independent coalition led by mayor Carlos Moedas. The PS abstained. Chega, the Bloco de Esquerda, the PCP and Livre voted against. It now goes to a 30-day public consultation, after which the executive considers the submissions and the text has to clear the Assembleia Municipal de Lisboa (Lisbon Municipal Assembly). Moedas does not command a majority there, but the arithmetic is comfortable: the regulation would only fall if the PS deputies switched from abstention to voting against.

What actually changes

The mayor's office describes the revision to the Portuguese press as "an essential instrument for giving Lisbon residents a more adequate response" on cleaning, and says the main changes are a clarification of the rules on how residents put their waste out and an alignment of the city with the environmental targets Portugal and the European Union have signed up to. Underneath that language sit four measurable things.

• The zone of influence goes from two metres to five. Article 73 of the 2019 regulation defines a "zona de influência" as a two-metre strip of pedestrian space measured out from the perimeter of the area a business occupies, or, where that is shorter, the mid-distance to the next business under the same obligation. Restaurants, cafés, kiosks, stalls and food trucks must clean that strip daily. Under the draft it becomes five metres, and the businesses concerned must also provide their own street-level containers, bins and ashtrays.
• The minimum fine rises from 50 to 90 euros. The 2019 text sets its lowest band at 50 to 1,000 euros for individuals and 150 to 8,000 euros for companies. That band covers a long list of ordinary lapses: moving a bin, fly-posting on a container, failing to sort waste properly, and, in the urban hygiene article, scattering food in a public space.
• Inspectors go from 18 to about 60. The mayor's office says the enforcement team will more than triple by the end of the year. That number matters more than the fine level does, because a 50-euro fine and a 90-euro fine are equally theoretical if there is nobody to write either one.
• Large producers lose access to municipal collection. Any producer of 1,100 litres a day or more, per establishment or collection point, must contract its own collection and treatment, subject to exceptions. Today the municipal service could do the job and charge for it.

The 1,100-litre line was always there

The 1,100-litre threshold is not new. It runs right through the 2019 regulation, which defines a "Grande Produtor" at exactly that level and limits the municipality's own duty to waste that does not exceed it. What changes is that Lisbon stops offering to do the work anyway. The mayor's office frames this as "removing pressure from municipal teams, which by that route achieve greater efficiency in collecting household waste in residential neighbourhoods".

The opposition frames it as the profitable half of the operation being handed away. Ricardo Moreira of the Bloco de Esquerda argues that giving up large-producer collection will widen the overall deficit of the service, because commercial collection is the part that pays. Carlos Teixeira of Livre says the council cannot show it is ready to make that move: the number of registered large producers in Lisbon, the tonnage they generate and the revenue the city has collected from them were all asked for at Wednesday's meeting and none was answered.

The PS councillor Pedro Anastácio makes the opposite kind of criticism, which is that the change does not go far enough and arrives five years late. The regulation in force dates from 2019 and has been due for revision since Decreto-Lei n.º 102-D/2020 of 10 December 2020 approved the Regime Geral da Gestão de Resíduos (General Waste Management Regime), which came into force on 1 July 2021. Anastácio also notes, accurately, that the large-producer rule the left is calling a privatisation derives from that 2020 law, which a Socialist government passed. His complaint is that the revision "limits itself to legal cross-references to what already existed" and that almost nothing is added to the 2019 text.

Pay as you throw, still not happening

The sharpest disagreement is about a system that does not yet exist in Lisbon and has not existed since it was first written into the rules. The current regulation already provides for a pay-as-you-throw model, in which a household is billed for what it actually discards, and it was never implemented. The waste fee in Lisbon is still calculated off water consumption, which is a proxy for household size rather than for waste.

Teixeira's objection is that the new draft repeats the ambition without the machinery: no phases, no pilot projects, no named neighbourhoods, no investment figures, no coverage targets and no solution for the hard part, which is measuring an individual household's waste in a city of apartment blocks and shared containers. The PCP's João Ferreira objects to the model itself, arguing that a consumer-pays principle pushed above a polluter-pays one lets the makers of packaging off and charges the people who had no alternative to buying it. Both he and Moreira compare it to Volta, the national deposit-return scheme that has been a running source of complaint since it became mandatory in August.

The part of the 2019 rules that already applies to you

Because the draft mostly amends a text that is already binding, the useful exercise for anyone living in Lisbon is to read what the current regulation says. Three provisions catch people who have never heard of it.

The first is article 84, which puts owners, tenants and operators of non-residential urban buildings under an express duty to clean the area they occupy and the area around it, including the zone of influence, and names alojamento local (short-term rental) units, hotels and service premises in the same breath. If you let a flat to visitors in Lisbon, the pavement outside it is your problem, not the council's.

The second is article 86, which halves both the minimum and the maximum of every fine in the regulation where the offence was merely negligent. A 90-euro floor is therefore a 45-euro floor for the ordinary case of someone who did not know the rule. The third is article 87, which allows the minimum to be doubled for a repeat offender while leaving the ceiling untouched, so the practical spread narrows sharply for anyone the new inspectors meet twice.

What this means for foreign residents

• If you run a business with a terrace, budget for the extra three metres: the sweeping obligation is daily, it is yours rather than the council's, and the draft adds a requirement to supply your own bins and ashtrays on the street.
• If you host on a short-term rental platform, the cleaning duty is already live: article 84 of the current regulation names alojamento local explicitly. That does not wait for the revision to pass.
• The enforcement change is the real one: going from 18 inspectors to around 60 in a city of half a million residents is the difference between a rule on paper and a rule you meet. The neighbourhoods with the densest concentration of pavement terraces, the Baixa, Bairro Alto, Cais do Sodré and Alcântara, are where a bigger enforcement team will be felt first.
• Your waste bill is not changing yet: the fee is still tied to water consumption, and nothing in the approved draft sets a date for switching to a volume-based charge.
• You can write to the consultation: the 30-day public consultation is open to anyone, not only to residents or Portuguese nationals, and submissions go to the executive before the text reaches the municipal assembly.

None of this is settled. A draft approved by a city executive with four parties voting against and one abstaining is a text that changes in consultation, and the two questions that went unanswered on Wednesday, how much large-producer revenue Lisbon is giving up and how it proposes to measure household waste, are exactly the ones the submissions will press on. What is settled is the direction: a city that topped the national list for complaints about uncollected rubbish this summer is choosing to enforce harder against the people on the pavement before it changes how anyone is billed.