Columbus has completed its 2026 Litter Index, a map assigning nearly every city street a score based on the amount of litter observed. The city says the results will help guide cleanup work and identify places where illegal dumping may be occurring. Employees including trash-collection workers, trained in the scoring system, surveyed and mapped streets during one week in August. The index rates streets from 1, meaning little or no litter, to 4, meaning extremely littered. Residents can view the results on the city’s online map. The annual effort is run by Keep Columbus Beautiful, part of the city’s Department of Public Service. Executive Director Aryeh Alex said the findings can help the city decide where to focus cleanup resources and evaluate whether its litter-removal efforts are working. “It gives us a map and a road map to determine where we should concentrate litter cleanup efforts,” Alex said, adding that the results can also point to potential illegal-dumping hot spots. This is the fifth time Columbus has released a litter map. Alex cautioned that it reflects conditions during the survey week, rather than how clean a street is throughout the year. He said the index is intended to support community efforts to address litter, not to single out neighborhoods. Overall, he said, litter has declined across the city over the years. Janine Bourdo, a Far West Side resident, hopes the index will help address litter locally. She spends some of her free time picking up trash and said she wants children to have a clean, safe place to play outdoors. “Sometimes I’ll just see some place that looks a mess and I’ll think, ‘Yeah, I can do that,’ and so I go down and pick that up, too,” Bourdo said. Bourdo said her street received the highest score in the 2026 index. The four-point scale assigns its highest score to streets with the most litter.