Litter Study Shows Just How Clean Charlotte Is
Published on April 28, 2026
Teams from across the City of Charlotte dedicate time every day to keeping the Queen City clean, beautiful and as litter-free as possible. Not only is litter an eyesore, but it can harm wildlife, block storm drains and pollute local waterways.
To get a clearer picture of litter in the city, Keep Charlotte Beautiful, a program within the Housing & Neighborhood Services department, conducted an in-depth study over the course of a year where volunteers visited 250 randomly selected road segments four different times.
The results are in! There are around four pieces of roadside litter per resident in Charlotte, which is dramatically lower than the national average of 152 pieces per resident. Although only four pieces per person, there are 3.7 million pieces of roadside litter in Charlotte on any given day.
The top five most littered items, in order, are cigarettes, plastic (other), paper (other), plastic food wrappers, and plastic bottles. You can explore a dashboard of the complete litter study results.
While well below the national average when it comes to litter, there is still more work to be done — and that takes all of us! Keep reading to learn more about how we’re tackling litter together and how you can help.
Solid Waste Services
Along with trash, recycling, yard and bulky waste collection, Solid Waste Services provides most of the litter cleanup throughout the city. Full-time cleanup crews collect litter along 12 routes each day, including 60 routes in the urban core every two weeks and 90 major corridor routes every quarter.
Each year, street sweepers clean around 12,000 miles of streets. The department also takes care of 500 public trash cans. Through these efforts, SWS collected about 7,000 tons of trash in 2024.
Residents can support Solid Waste by properly preparing their materials. Detailed collection guidelines are available online. Stay connected by texting your collection day of the week to 73224. The text alerts are available in English and Spanish. For example, if your collection day is Thursday, you would text “Thursday” for English updates or "Jueves" for Spanish updates to 73224.
Housing & Neighborhood Services
Keep Charlotte Beautiful (KCB), a key program within this department, helps educate and empower residents to participate in waste reduction efforts, including community cleanups. In partnership with Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, KCB offers lessons on waste reduction and litter prevention to K-5 students. KCB volunteers contributed over 11,000 hours in picking up over 5,500 bags of litter in 2024.
There are many ways to get involved with KCB:
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Storm Water Services
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Storm Water Services protects and improves the quality of streams and other surface waters, like ponds and lakes. Litter can easily find its way into storm drains, ending up in nearby streams. Storm Water Services offers year-round education, hosts monthly stream clean-up events and manages the Adopt-a-Stream program, partnering with 82 active business, civic and neighborhood groups. In FY 2025, more than 4,800 volunteers engaged in activities to protect waterways across the county, collecting over 67,000 pounds of litter and marking more than 1,500 storm drains with educational decals.
Learn about Storm Water Services projects and how residents can get involved.
Office of Sustainability and Resilience
The Office of Sustainability and Resilience has a mission of helping Charlotte continuously improve, protect and preserve the environment, its community, and economy, while ensuring equity and resilience. The Strategic Energy Action Plan Plus (SEAP+), which is the city’s roadmap for reaching climate and energy goals, has a cross-sectional focus area that includes waste reduction and diversion. By increasing waste diversion from landfills and using new technologies, Charlotte can lower emissions, reduce pollution and create a more sustainable waste system.
Landscape Management
The Landscape Management division of the Department of General Services maintains trees in the right-of-way and city-owned green spaces, totaling more than 1,000 medians and 300 acres of land. The team has to remove any litter before cutting grass or trimming plants. Landscape Management also oversees more than 600 acres of vacant properties that occasionally face illegal dumping issues
Explore the services that Landscape Management has to offer.