The new government of Vilanova i la Geltrú (PSC and ECP) ??has strictly ruled out the implementation of door-to-door garbage collection throughout the city. “We will not apply the homogeneous ‘door to door'”, asserted the mayor Juan Luis Ruiz, who has criticized the “unfeasible” approach made by ERC, Capgirem – CUP and Junts during the last legislature.
The new executive opts for introducing door-to-door collection during the next bid, but only in the case of industry and stores in the main commercial hubs. As for domestic waste, they defend dialogue with neighborhood associations to assess the implementation of some pilot test in specific neighborhoods and then study whether it extends to other areas.
After last October 2022 the City Council suspended the new public tender to tender the garbage collection service and the implementation of the ‘door to door’, the new executive has ensured that the next tender will not include this model for all the city. “The previous government put forward a proposal that had to be withdrawn because it was unfeasible,” said the spokesman and Town Planning councilor, Gerard Llobet, who recalled that the waste collection contract has expired since 2018.
Llobet and the mayor Juan Luis Ruiz have set the end of 2023 as the deadline to open the new tender, which includes door-to-door waste collection for industrial and commercial uses. The forecast is to allocate a couple of municipal workers in the coming months to visit the 3,000 establishments in the city to find out about the waste management needs, to later define the collection model.
In the case of household garbage, Ruiz wants to forget the “failed” model proposed by the previous executive and opts for “calmly studying” a proposal with neighborhood associations to assess the implementation of pilot tests in certain areas of the city. The government guarantees that the new tender can have a “flexible” format that allows these tests to be introduced and their progressive implementation by neighborhoods. “We want to agree on everything with the opposition and the citizenry, unlike the model proposed by the previous legislature, which was not explained to anyone,” Ruiz snapped.
While waiting to define the new model “to put an end to an unsustainable provisionality”, this summer the government has agreed to several reorganizations of the service to reinforce waste collection coinciding with the summer season and the celebration of the Copa América in September. In this sense, there will be more collection of bulky items, more collection around the container blocks and also cleaning inside them. “We cannot allow ourselves images of islands overflowing with bags, like other summers,” Llobet pointed out.
On the other hand, the spokesperson and Town Planning councilor explained that the islands will be reorganized to homogenize the five different models of containers, while the company Valoriza will carry out an image wash of the fleet of vehicles. Work is also being done on the progressive removal of the underground container islands due to the problems of breakdowns and incivility that accumulate.
In parallel to the collection of waste, the government has also announced that it is working to make changes to the street cleaning service, municipalized during the last mandate. The executive has commissioned a study to assess whether it is viable to keep the service internalized through the Water Company or if it is better to outsource it again.
Llobet has assured that the workers “are asking for more resources” to be able to meet all the demand for work. In addition, he has lamented that “the charge of the municipalization prevents allocate more money.” “We cannot have a city that has spikes in population growth and cleaning needs, and not attend to it if it is not for the efforts of the workers,” she added. In turn, the mayor Juan Luiz Ruiz has highlighted that this summer they have agreed to a crash plan “to guarantee the cleaning of the streets on Sundays in summer, which has not been done in recent years.”
