Street care and cleaning definitions

The following criteria is used to define street cleanliness. The definition of these terms is necesscary for consistent reporting and scoring at local and national levels.

Litter

The Environmental Protection Act 1990 states that litter is:

 'anything dropped, thrown, left or deposited that causes defacement, in a public place'

Litter includes mainly synthetic materials, often associated with smoking, eating and drinking that are improperly discarded by members of the public.

Litter also includes animal faeces.

Detritus

Detritus comprises of dust, mud, soil, grit stones, rotted leaf and vegetable residues, and fragments of twigs, glass, plastic and other finely divided materials.

Detritus includes leaf and blossom falls when they have substantially lost their structure and have become mushy or fragmented.