FCC Medio Ambiente will continue to provide urban services in El Puerto de Santa María (Cádiz) with the recent award of the new contract for waste collection, street cleansing and management of household recycling centres in the city. The contract, which will employ 187 people, is worth around €170 million over the next 10 years.

The municipal team and the company, present in the city since 1980, have as the fundamental axis of the new project of services the commitment to environmental sustainability, for which reason the entire fleet of vehicles will be renewed with electric, hybrid and Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) units, all with the Eco or Zero Emissions environmental label, resulting in a reduction in noise and pollutants.

Technological innovation also takes on special importance with the implementation of VISION, integral management digital platform for comprehensive service management, which has been developed exclusively by FCC Medio Ambiente and which enables real-time interaction with service incidents, requests from residents and the council team. It will be integrated with the municipal application and a GPS tracking and monitoring system will also be incorporated for the entire fleet, mobile machinery and personnel. The waste containers will have a radio frequency identification (RFID) system with smart tags or ‘transponders’.

The contract also commits to the social sustainability of the services and will integrate people with disabilities into the workforce through subcontracting the FCC Equal Special Employment Centre for waste container maintenance and recycling centre management tasks, with the aim of reaching 9% of the total workforce.

With regard to the waste collection service, which handles around 45,000 tonnes a year, the selective collection of organic waste is being introduced, with the incorporation of differentiated collection in Horeca businesses using a two-compartment collector, and the service will be updated to the new bilateral collection system. To this end, 21 vehicles will be available, including 15 state-of-the-art collectors and different capacities and tippers, and the complete renewal of the container fleet. In order to reinforce the tasks of washing and maintaining containers, the frequency will be increased with the incorporation of 2 specific washing units and a new service facility will be built that will have a warehouse to maintain these containers and space to store them.

The management of recycling centres will also incorporate new machinery, with electric compactors and open-box vehicles. The construction of a new permanent household recycling centre is planned for the middle of the contract period, as well as the incorporation of five mobile ones in different areas of the municipality in order to facilitate the recycling of household waste for citizens.

The street cleansing service, which covers nearly 300 km of streets, will have 44 vehicles, including 6 dual-purpose sweepers, as well as electric self-propelled machinery such as street sweepers and ‘Glutón’ type vacuum cleaners. To increase the efficiency of the service, the municipality has been divided into 5 sectors, each with a team coordinator to ensure communication and synergy between the different tasks, increasing the versatility of each member of the work brigades. The tasks of emptying bins are separated from those of manual sweeping to improve the efficiency of both services, except in the city centre where narrow, pedestrianised streets with a high density of passers-by make it necessary to combine the two. The incorporation of multifunctional equipment is very important, as its versatility allows it to work as a sweeper, a street washer and/or a scrubber-dryer.

All these new developments will be supported by awareness campaigns to inform the general public, retailers and the hospitality industry about the launch of the new service, as well as advertising campaigns in the media and customer service campaigns.