Navan remains 'Moderately Littered' in latest national litter survey

Navan remains 'Moderately Littered' in Ireland's latest national litter survey climbing just two places on the previous year.

Sligo has been deemed Ireland's cleanest town in the 2025 Irish Business Against Litter IBAL rankings.

No town or city was judged to be “seriously littered”, with Limerick’s Galvone, Mahon in Cork and Tallaght in Dublin along the urban areas attaining clean status. Dublin’s North Inner City was at the foot of the rankings, but was much improved on 2024.

According to IBAL, much of Navan was clean, with six out of the ten sites getting the top litter grade – these included:

"Boyne Rampart Heritage Walk, the residential area of Swanbrook and Market Square – the latter is an excellent example of a town centre environment which has been attractively laid out.

"However, the overall result was let down by three heavily littered sites: a miscellaneous site on Academy Street, as it approaches R147 and an area behind fencing at Foresters Car Park. The area under the bridge beside the Recycle Bank was marginally better, only just."

In January 2024, Navan had improved its standing in the Irish Business Against Litter (IBAL) League moving up three places from the previous survey. Navan was deemed to be 'Clean to European Norms' finishing in 25th place in the survey of 40 towns around the country.

However in January 2025 there was a disappointing result for Navan with the town deemed to be "moderately littered" and finishing 32nd out of the 40 towns surveyed.

The number of towns deemed clean last year rose to 28, with Sligo finishing top for the first time, ahead of Leixlip, Westport and Monaghan. An Taisce, who conduct the surveys on behalf of IBAL, lauded the winning town for its consistently strong performance in recent years.

Waterford reclaimed its customary accolade of Ireland’s cleanest city, ahead of Galway. Cork City Centre was also clean. While urban areas still dominate the lower reaches of the rankings, 10 of the 13 surveyed showed an improvement in cleanliness in 2025. Galvone in Limerick achieved clean status for the first time, having been branded “seriously littered” in past years.

“The most pleasing finding of 2025 was the progress made in socially disadvantaged areas,” explains Mr Horgan. “Even areas at the foot of our rankings have significantly lower litter levels than a year ago. Cork’s Northside, Dublin City Centre and North Inner City, while still littered, are cases in point. The investment being made by Dublin City Council seems to be already paying fruit, and we are set to see further progress in 2026 if the Council comes good on its promise of replacing bags with bins across the city. This could be a landmark year in the fight against litter.”

There was a notable fall-off in the number of sites with large accumulations of litter or subject to dumping. “This continues a very welcome trend we’ve seen in recent surveys and credit must go to local authorities for ridding our environment of these litter blackspots,” comments Mr Horgan. This was the first IBAL survey where no bottle bank was deemed a litter blackspot.

The survey revealed that the Deposit Return Scheme continues to have a positive impact on the cleanliness of our towns and cities, with a 10% drop in the prevalence of cans and plastic bottles compared to the previous year. These two types of litter are now 60 per cent less common than when the scheme was introduced in early 2024.

Coffee cups remained one of the most commonly found forms of litter and was evident in one fifth of all sites surveyed. “A real disappointment in a generally positive year has been the likely collapse of reusable coffee cup schemes in towns such as Killarney,” says Mr Horgan. “It is apparent that such schemes will only work with statutory backing. As our data today bears out, without Government intervention coffee cups will remain an unsightly and entirely unnecessary blot on the landscape across our towns. The prevarication from Government on the issue is striking – a levy was promised all of four years ago – and sends out a worrying signal. Weaning ourselves off single-use coffee cups should not be such a big deal.”

The prevalence of disposable vapes, which are set to be outlawed over the course of 2026, was unchanged.