Report where it happened, not where you are
The single most common problem with litter reports is the location. A report filed from your sofa an hour later usually carries your home address, not the location of the rubbish, and a crew sent to the wrong street will close the job as "nothing found".
If you cannot report on the spot, take the photo there. Most phones record GPS coordinates inside the photo, and a report built from that photo lands in the right place. CleanSpot reads those coordinates and offers to move the pin for you when the photo was taken somewhere other than where you are standing.
Photograph the thing, then the context
Two photos beat ten. The first should be close enough to show what the waste actually is, because that determines who has to collect it: household bags, construction debris and hazardous material are handled by different teams, sometimes different organisations entirely.
The second should be far enough back to show where it is: a doorway, a bin, a road sign, a junction. Whoever is dispatched needs to recognise the place from a moving vehicle.
Say how much, not how bad
Descriptions like "disgusting" or "a disgrace" carry no operational information. What a crew needs to know is scale and access: roughly how much there is, whether one person could clear it, whether a vehicle can get close, and whether anything about it is dangerous.
That is why CleanSpot asks for a severity instead of free text, light, moderate or heavy, and suggests one from your photo, which you can change before submitting.
- Light: a bag or two, one person could handle it
- Moderate: needs equipment, or two to three people
- Heavy: a large dump, or anything hazardous
Hazardous waste is a different report
Asbestos sheeting, drums of unknown liquid, gas canisters, syringes, car batteries and anything leaking should not be treated as ordinary litter and should never be moved by hand. Report it, mark it heavy, and keep your distance.
If something presents an immediate danger to people, a chemical spill, a fire risk, a blocked road, contact your local emergency or council hotline directly. A report in any app is a queue, not an alarm.
What happens after you send it
On CleanSpot a report becomes a pin on a public map straight away, so neighbours can see it, confirm it and add photos. Anyone can volunteer to clean it, on their own or as an organised group event.
Where the local authority subscribes to the CleanSpot dashboard, the same report also arrives in their triage inbox, where it can be assigned to a municipal team or an external contractor and tracked to completion. Where they do not, the report still stands as a public, timestamped record, which is frequently what gets a recurring dumping site taken seriously.
Reporting the same spot twice
Duplicate reports fragment the evidence and make a site look less serious than it is. Before you post, check whether a pin already exists within a few metres. CleanSpot does this automatically and offers to add your photo to the existing report instead.
If a place is cleared and then dumped on again, that is not a duplicate. Reopening the original report is what builds the history showing the site is recurring rather than a one-off.
Do I need an account to report litter?
You need one to publish a report, because reports are attributed and that is what keeps the map trustworthy. CleanSpot is free for citizens with no ads and nothing to buy inside the app.
What if my council is not on CleanSpot?
The report still works. It appears on the public map, neighbours can confirm it, and volunteers can organise a cleanup. It also remains a dated, photographed record you can point at when raising the issue with the authority directly.
Can I report something that is not litter?
Yes. Broken streetlights, potholes, overflowing bins, damaged signs and similar civic problems are reported as public issues, which follow their own reported → resolved lifecycle.
Is my exact location shared?
The location of the report is public, because that is what makes the map work. Your account details, personal data and location history are not. They are GDPR-protected, EU-hosted and never sold.