Galway City is the cleanest city in Ireland according to the latest survey by Irish Businesses Against Litter which measures trash in towns and cities.
Galway City Centre has continued to climb rankings in the litter survey of 40 towns and cities, moving up to tenth place on the list to become “Cleaner than European Norms”, jumping ahead category from the last survey in June 2019.
However Ballybane has dropped off the clean list, dropping down to being “Moderately Littered” once again, while Ballinasloe has remained in the same position.
Despite falling off the clean list, Ballybane has still made huge leaps forward in recent years. Not that long ago is was one of the most worst litter blackspots in Ireland.
“We’ve seen the fruits of the greater attention given to keeping our city centres clean,” said Conor Horgan of IBAL, “to the point where they are now almost as clean as our towns.”
However he warned that the gap between clean areas and those most neglected is not closing as well as it should be.
Kilkenny has once been declared the cleanest town in Ireland for the fourth time. Overall 21 towns and urban areas out of the 40 surveyed were deemed ‘clean’.
This survey is carried out by An Taisce on behalf of Irish Businesses Against Litter twice a year to determine he overall cleanliness of Ireland’s major towns and cities.
The past decade has seen an overall reduction in the amount of litter in our city centres, Conor Horgan said, while towns have remained steady over the same period.
Sweet wrappers, chewing gum and cigarette butts remain the most common forms of litter on our streets.
“Perhaps no one item illustrates the link between litter and the broader environment better than the cigarette butt,” contends Conor Horgan.
“Cigarette filters are essentially single-use plastic which readily winds its way into our sewers and rivers, adding to the problem of plastic pollution, which threatens to see more plastic in our oceans than fish by 2050.
“Yet every day we see people nonchalantly flicking butts onto our pavements,” Conor Horgan concluded.
