In 2025, volunteers with Legambiente collected and catalogued 24,260 pieces of litter across 49 urban parks in 20 Italian cities, from Milan to Naples, Florence to Potenza, Bologna, Perugia, and Udine. The results paint a troubling picture: on average, four items of waste were found for every square meter surveyed.
Cigarette butts remain the most common waste (10,472, or 161 every 100 square meters), followed by paper and cardboard (11%), metals (9.1%), glass and ceramics (7.1%), and rubber (4.3%). Most concerning, however, is the overwhelming presence of plastics, which account for 64.3% of the total. Despite the EU’s Single-Use Plastics Directive, more than half of the litter collected still belongs to the category it was designed to regulate.
These findings come from Legambiente’s Park Litter survey, presented for the 33rd edition of Puliamo il Mondo, Italy’s version of Clean Up the World, which kicks off this weekend in hundreds of towns under the motto: “If you love it, protect it.”
Beyond waste collection, the initiative also highlights issues in urban areas: in 38 out of 65 sites surveyed, litter hotspots were found near benches and picnic tables; fewer than half of the parks provided bins with windproof lids or facilities for separate collection. Even more alarming, storm drains and gutters were present in 73.8% of the areas—risking direct transport of poorly managed urban waste into rivers and seas.