For every hundred meters of beach there is 705 pieces of waste.The results of Legambiente's beach litter survey

Despite the Sup directive, plastic waste on Italian beaches is still the majority.Legambiente data confirms this.

• With the Beach litter campaign, Legambiente volunteers collected and cataloged waste on 33 Italian beaches.
• They found 23,259:the average is 705 waste per hundred meters of linear beach.
• Cigarette butts and plastic objects are among the most widespread waste, despite the ban imposed by the European Union.

Plastic:lots and lots of plastic.But also cigarette butts, building materials, pieces of glass.They are the waste found in Italian beaches by hundreds of volunteers from local clubs Legambiente, engaged in a powerful work of renamed citizen science Beach litter.

How did Legambiente's Beach litter campaign go?

For the 2024 edition of the Beach litter campaign, volunteers monitored 33 beaches distributed in all coastal regions of Italy, with the exception of Veneto, Friuli-Venezia Giulia and Molise.In a total area of ​​179 thousand square meters they collected and catalogued 23,259 wastes.The average, therefore, is 705 waste per hundred meters of linear beach.

For the first time, the environmental organization has adopted an indicator which, based on the density of waste in the monitored sample areas, allows the degree of cleanliness of the beaches to be objectively assessed.Is called Clean coast index (the acronym is Cci) and is an international standard.The partial good news is that more than 42 percent of the beaches are "very clean" and only 6.06 percent fall into the "dirty" and "very dirty" categories.

What waste is most present on Italian beaches

It is undoubtedly a promising result but, precisely, partial.Because, as a whole, the amount of waste is still worrying.And it is worrying that, more than two years after the entry into force in our country of the European directive on single-use plastics (the so-called Sup directive), the Italian coasts are still packed with plastic.

79.7 percent of the waste found on beaches is plastic, the absolute majority:then there are glass and ceramics (6.6 percent), metal (4.5 percent) and paper and cardboard (2.9 percent).Just cutlery, straws, cotton buds and others products prohibited by the Sup. directive, together with nets and fishing gear, still represent more than half of the total waste monitored in 2024.To be precise, 56.3 percent.A percentage that has not seen major variations over the last ten years.But the waste most present on Italian beaches is cigarette butts:Legambiente volunteers found 3,338, that is, 101 for every one hundred linear meters of beach.

Data that demonstrates how laws are necessary, but not sufficient.People need to be willing to respect them and have the means to do so.“It is on the habits of those who frequent natural spaces, such as beaches and the banks of rivers and lakes, that we must continue to intervene through information and awareness-raising activities and with the implementation of effective collection services for these more delicate and complicated contexts to achieve,” he confirms Giorgio Zampetti, general director of Legambiente.