One in five of the bits of rubbish which the 21,031 volunteers in Canberra collected over the year was the end of a cigarette, Clean Up Australia said.

That's a higher proportion than in any other state or territory.

The volunteers in the ACT picked up more than 60,000 items in twelve months.

They worked at 207 locations across the territory and reported what they found to the central office of the Clean Up Australia organisation.

The two big items which the ACT volunteers found were soft plastics at 26 per cent (meaning flexible plastic which can be scrunched into a ball) followed by the cigarette butts at 22 per cent.

Discarded masks were a newcomer on the list for the obvious reason that the pandemic was still rampant in the year covered by the annual report.

Canberrans' favourite places for just throwing something to the ground were parks, including national parks, and school grounds. Roughly 23,000 items were picked up from parks and 12,000 from school grounds. Between them, that was more than half the total.

The figures are published in the Clean Up Australia Rubbish Report for 2022.

The stats have prompted some of the volunteers to appeal to their fellow Canberrans to clean up their act.

"It's a beautiful country that we are living in," volunteer Krish Venkataraman said.

"There are rubbish bins and it's just a question of going to those bins - but people just pass them by.

"We can't clean the whole country. If everyone did their bit and put their rubbish in the bin, it would be a lot better."

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While the current focus is on cigarette butts, Clean Up Australia said it was worried about the discarded waste from vaping.

"E-cigarettes are an environmental triple threat - creating plastic waste, electronic waste and hazardous waste," the organisation's chairperson, Pip Kiernan, said.

But conventional cigarettes remained the big ACT problem.

"Last year, our ACT volunteers recorded the highest percentage of cigarette butts in the country," Ms Kiernan said.

"When we think of plastic pollution, we usually think of chip packets, drink bottles or straws, but cigarette butts are the most abundant plastic litter item in the world."

Clean Up Australia promotes what it calls Clean Up Australia Day which is held on the first Sunday of March every year - this year, it's March 5.

But it also encourages local groups to organise their own "clean up days" on other days of the year.

It is particularly worried about plastics.

Bans on single-use plastic bags have not got rid of the problem.

"Plastic has remained the most common category of rubbish picked up on Clean Up Australia day over the last 20 years," the organisation said.

"Because plastic bags last so long, every year, the number of plastic bags in the litter stream increases. Currently, only three per cent of plastic bags used in Australia are recycled."

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