Cigarette butts have overtaken soft plastic wrappers as the most littered individual item in Australia, a new Clean Up Australia survey shows.
Cigarette butts are now Australia’s most littered item, according to the latest annual litter report from Clean Up Australia.
The survey found cigarette butts accounted for 23.6% of all individual litter items collected across streets, parks, bushland and waterways, up 3.5% on the previous year.
Soft plastic wrappers ranked second at 18.6%, followed by plastic bags at 8.7%.
Clean Up Australia chair Pip Kiernan said the increase was troubling, estimating about 8.9 billion cigarette butts are littered nationwide each year.
Kiernan said many people were unaware cigarette butts are made of plastic, shedding microfibres, leaching toxic waste and taking up to 30 years to break down.
Plastics remained the dominant category of litter overall, making up 80.8% of all items counted.
Soft plastics accounted for 30.5% of all litter, while packaging of all types made up nearly 60%.
The report also found discarded vapes at 33.5% of surveyed sites, up 23.5% over three years, prompting calls for a national safe disposal system.
