Fermanagh District Council were one of six Councils across Northern Ireland who contributed to a recent survey looking at the cleanliness of streets across the province.
The results show a rising tide of sweet wrappers and cigarette butts being discarded on the streets.
The findings show that 92% of streets in the six Councils surveyed met government cleanliness guidelines during 2007. While this is an improvement on the 13% failure rate of the previous year, both cigarette litter and confectionery related litter has been on the increase during the same period.
"It is pleasing to see confirmation that Northern Ireland is getting cleaner, but it is a constant battle to keep litter off our streets and we are now seeing some worrying trends that need to addressed immediately," said TIDY Northern Ireland spokesman Nigel Frazer.
"Sadly it is no surprise to see an increase in cigarette litter following the introduction of the public smoking ban, but the dramatic rise in confectionery litter is an unexpected and worrying development. This form of litter is now outnumbering old chewing gum deposits for the first time, and if we are to continue reporting improvements in cleanliness levels then people need to change their attitudes immediately. It requires very little effort to hold onto rubbish until you are near a suitable place to dispose of it, but people's careless attitude to the problem means councils are forced to spend huge chunks of the rate payer's money on cleaning up the mess we leave in our wake."
Over the past year surveyors have scrutinised almost 1,000 public sites in the province's largest annual litter survey, searching for litter and dirt on the pavements and recording the types and sources of litter across a variety of different land use types.
The 2007 Borough Cleanliness Survey revealed that cigarette litter is present on almost half of our streets, with confectionery litter found on 38% of areas surveyed.
While dog fouling is regarded as one of the worst forms of litter it was found to be one of the least frequent offenders, being found on only five percent of the areas examined.
