The Sunshine State has a new title, it’s one of the the dirtiest states Australia according to a national littering survey.

Cigarette butts top the list as the most common type of rubbish.

Karin Adam reports.

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TRANSCRIPT

Beautiful one day, a rubbish dump the next!. Queensland is now declared the most littered state in mainland Australia.

Keep Australia Beautiful, which carried out the survey, says it’s a disgrace.

Rick Burnett, CEO Keep Australia Beautiful Qld: “In short, I’m very upset and it means we have a lot of work to do.”

At home, Queenslanders are doing the right thing by recycling rubbish.

But it’s when people are outside, shopping or going to the beach that they can’t get their rubbish in the bins.

Rick Burnett, CEO Keep Australia Beautiful Qld: “If we’re going to keep Australia beautiful it really does come back to the individual’s responsibility not to drop litter.”

In Brisbane, and people couldn’t agree more.

Vox 1: “It’s slack. You’ve got bins all around. Might as well use them.”

Vox 2: “I think it’s very sad because as a nation we’ve been aware of littering for a long time.”

Vox 3: “I always put my cigarette butts in the bin – it’s not that hard.”

Of the twenty billion cigarettes estimated to be smoked in Australia each year, it’s in retail centres like this where seven billion of those butts are thrown away as litter.

Plus another – almost.

Smoker: Because I’m going to walk over there on my way back to work and put it in the rubbish.”

But one in ten butts end up in the waterways, threatening sea-life including birds.

Rick Burnett, CEO Keep Australia Beautiful Qld: “If we were to measure how good people are, the litterers are right down there. They’re not thoughtful, they’re not considerate, they’re lazy and ignorant.”

Education is the key and Keep Australia Beautiful will launch a new campaign next year in the hope of changing the culture of littering in Queensland.

Karin Adam, QUT News.