Street cleaning

It was heavily raining, when I woke up this morning. Now, it wasn't the rain that was the problem. A noisy street cleaning truck was loud enough to wake me. And yes, it was washing the street while it was raining. No surprise, though, it happens every time. As a municipal worker you don't question your duties, you follow orders exactly.

Cleaning workers hosing down the steets. Photo by the news site ABCdesevilla.es

The street cleaning service in Seville provides regular mechanical sweeping and washing of streets on a scheduled basis to produce clean roadways, parking lots and walking spaces. Generally, there's no manual sweeping undertaken - any outdoor surface is to be cleaned by water and other detergents. And, there are no street flushers used on the vehicle-free paved areas for pedestrian use as there's hardly any litter picking. The street flushers are used to wash the fine dust material that remains on the road surface after the mechanical street sweepers have finished removing all the loads of dog mess and litter; from food, plastic carrier bags and bottles, empty snack bags and sweet wrappers to cigarette butts. The jet-washing of streets is a considerable source of waste in local government spending, seeing that it's done using large street cleaning water trucks with high-pressure hoses and wasting tons of water in the process. The municipalities invest, without a second thought, in modern equipment to jet wash the steets and public areas known to be used frequently. All the parts of city, continuing all over the metropolitan area, have standard rubbish bins on the streets. At least that's something, although you can't separate recyclables from other solid waste. Furthermore, waste collectors collect the waste every day and cleaning workers jet wash the streets down every single night, which for me is a waste in human resource and time, since, too often, people are careless and sloppy with no regard for the impact of their behaviour on the street environment and esthetics. Spending time with friends and family in outdoor cafés or wherever, an incredible amount of rubbish is left on the streets. No particular attention is paid to pets walked outside either, so the streets are literally covered in dog mess. Shift in mentality would work wonders for Sevillians.

Washing of containers. Image taken from the official website of Carmona

Washing of tools and equipment. Photo by the open public tenders' site desevilla.org

Wasting in human resources and energy. Photo by the open public tenders' site desevilla.org

As the sign says, potable water is not used for this work. Photo by Carlos Navarro Antolín