What new survey tells us about litter on streets of Scotland

And experts stress our throwaway consumer culture - combined with ongoing challenges for public and private finances - means the nation is still facing a litter emergency.

The annual report by independent watchdogs Keep Scotland Beautiful or KSB shows 92.1% of thousands of inspected sites up and down the country were deemed “acceptable” in 2023-24.

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This means that last financial year nearly 8% of spots visited were unacceptably littered — with five or more items - compared with around 10% 12 months earlier. 

Such national headline figures - from a benchmarking and inspection scheme called the Local Environmental Audit and Management System or LEAMS - only tell part of the story.

The data also shows that only 27.9% of nearly 13,000 sites inspected were entirely litter free.  

Nearly three quarters of Scotland, in other words, has some kind of litter, most frequently from what people have been eating, chewing or smoking.

Barry Fisher, the chief executive of  Keep Scotland Beautiful, was upbeat but realistic about the new figures.

 “Positively,” he said, “our latest data shows that the number of sites with significant levels of litter have decreased for the second year running. 

“In the context of tackling Scotland's litter emergency, we must take inspiration and encouragement from this.

"However, we must remain realistic. The national picture is still one which is worse than pre-pandemic surveys – with only 28% of sites being recorded as litter free. 

“Once again smoking related items, including single-use vapes, are the most common litter type recorded, while food and drink packaging is responsible for a quarter of litter.

"Any improvement on the amount of litter prevalent on our streets is welcome. But we must maintain this momentum into future years and ensure this trend continues. 

“This will be challenging given the financial challenges facing national and local government but we will continue to encourage collaboration and investment across the public and private sectors to help maintain progress.”

Zooming in to town centres the situation is even worse than the official national LEAMS benchmark.

Only 87.4% of them were deemed acceptable. Only 15% had no litter at all.

Perhaps most strikingly, fully 50% of public spaces in urban centres were polluted with spat-out gum, a persistent and expensive problem for local councils to fix. 

Of the same kind of spots  - and KSB inspected 1200 of them - some 14% had graffiti, 2.2% other vandalism, 3.3% fly tipping and 7.9% flyposting.

But the figures also show huge disparities in the environment, especially between the richest and poorest areas, or between town and country. 

The most deprived communities are far dirtier than than the richest. 

KSB data shows that areas deemed best off - that is the highest quintile or 20% in the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation - had far lower levels of litter.

In such areas some 97.7% of inspected sites were ruled acceptable. Only 0.2% were described as heavily littered.

Compare these numbers with those for the most deprived quintile. Only 80.1% of such spots were acceptable. Fully 4.9% were heavily littered.

Some 18.2% of the best off sites visited by KSB had evidence of gum. That figure more than doubled for the poorest areas to 44.4%.

This gulf in cleanliness between rich and poor areas presents significant challenges for local councils, who are responsible for cleaning up the mess their citizens - and often businesses too - leave behind.

KSB, in its official report stressed that the Scottish Government’s strategy for handling littering and fly-tipping prioritises getting good data on what rubbish was finding its way in to the environment - and where.

It said: “The LEAMS programme has continued to highlight the areas that are in the most need for intervention to improve the quality of the local environment and shows that, while there have been some positive changes, the street cleanliness score is below pre-pandemic levels and there is strong evidence of a correlation between areas of deprivation, land use and quality outcomes.”

The data shows that fully 44.8% of all litter found in Scotland’s streets is smoking related, such as cigarette butts and plastic disposable vapes. Another 12.6 is bottles and cans, 10.7%confectionary wrappers, and 4.3% fast food and its packaging.

KSB has also broken down litter - which, crucially is not just rubbish which is “dropped” - on how it got in to the environment. 

It described pedestrians as the source of nearly 71.1% of litter.  Another 7.2% was “domestic waste” - a category which would include rubbish blown or spilled out of household bins - while 1.7% came from businesses.

There were significant problems with litter across the UK and the rest of Europe during the pandemic. Keep Wales Tidy, a charity similar to KSB, does its own audit, but only for streets. It found a similar improving trend with 95% of streets checked meeting acceptable standards. Only 5% of spots inspected by KWT were litter-free.

Fisher of KSB stressed Scots were keen to see the back of litter. 

He said: “We are on the right track, and we know there is a determination to address Scotland's issue with litter from communities across the country - 45,000 people turned out to support our Spring Clean this year. 

“With ninety per-cent of people agreeing that litter is a problem across Scotland, combining this determination with the correct infrastructure and policies in place to tackle the items that are continually being littered is the only way we can become a litter free nation."