Overall litter levels across Ireland are still high, despite the success of the deposit return scheme in keeping bottles and cans off the streets.
The latest survey by the Irish Businesses Against Litter (IBAL) group has identified Naas as the cleanest area in Ireland, a retention of the title for three out of four of the past years.
The only city to be judged clean by IBAL is Galway which replaced Waterford in last year's survey.
Dublin hasn't fared well on the survey, alongside Limerick and Cork’s Northside.
IBAL spokesperson Connor Horgan told Newstalk Breakfast that the deposit return scheme is “clearly working” but there is still very “little change”.
'Little change'
“We're seeing from the reports that there's a significant fall in can litter and plastic bottle litter out there and that's welcome, but there's clearly lots of other forms of litter that people are discarding with no regard for their environment, because the story this time around is one of little change,” he said.
“There's just as much litter out there today as there was 12 months ago.
“That's not good news, particularly when we look at our cities - Dublin's north inner city, unfortunately, is bottom of the pile.
“It has slipped into seriously littered and just generally, the city areas dominate the lower rungs of our table, we're not seeing headway there.”
Governmental change
Mr Horgan said there needs to be Governmental change in order to see a change on litter in Dublin city.
“Dublin city has had a bad run of it - in recent times, we've spoken of nothing but how badly the city's doing on the litter front,” he said.
“We do think that we need levers from Government to bring about change.
“We're banging this drum for years [and] we're not seeing change.
“We need to see measures like the transition from bags to bins, which is on the cards now - we need to see that happen in Dublin's north inner city, bags are totally ill suited for waste collection, and there's lots of streets that can accommodate bins.
“We need levies in the form of a coffee cup levy, we need a ban on vapes - lots of things that the outgoing Government at least had broached and were putting in place - we need to see those measures carried through.”
Mr Horgan said there is no “quick fix” but there are definitely instruments the new Government can put in place to help curb this issues.
A person walking down the street in Dublin. Picture by: Lawrence Smith / Alamy Stock Photo
