GOLD Coast City Council has pushed aside Keep Australia Beautiful's initative Spotless Suburbs because of budgetary restraints.

The proposed program was aimed at creating friendly competition between suburbs in encouraging communities, schools and businesses to take pride in cleaning up their areas and identifying who has done it best.

Councillor Robert La Castra said it was a combination of bad timing and budget restrictions.

"The matter has been referred to the 11/12 budget deliberations to give consideration to a whole of city funding, rather than individual councillors funding specific projects from their respective divisions," he said.

However, it was a case of time over environment.

"Some councillors felt that it would be more beneficial to be held at a different time of the year and also because there would be councillors with limited funding available in their respective divisional budgets," he said.

However, this has not cut it with Keep Australia Beautiful chief executive officer Rick Burnett who has labelled council's decision as disappointing.

"I had a good discussion with mayor Ron Clarke and I thought he was very supportive and we would like to thank him for that, however it is very dissapointing," he said.

Mr Burnett said the project had been running very successfully in Brisbane where it runs in 26 divisions and the Gold Coast could use the benefits.

"We want the Gold Coast to have cleaner park areas. We will try again in the new year," he said.

The Spotless Suburbs initative was proposed as a one-year pilot to be funded by $14,000 from current council budget allocations and $2000 from each of the 14 divisions.

The council spends more than $9 million a year on cleaning up rubbish from roads, shopping precincts, beaches as well as routine street cleaning and public bin collections.