Bilbao City Council, where FCC Medio Ambiente has been providing services uninterruptedly since 1972, has awarded the recent contracts for waste collection and street cleansing in the city (Lot 1) and Mercabilbao (Lot 2) to the Bio Garbiketa joint venture, in which the company holds a majority stake. The order book value amounts to around €268 million for the next five years.

To serve the more than 346,000 inhabitants of the municipality, the company will have a staff of 900 people and a fleet of over 300 vehicles, 33% of which boast the ECO environmental label, both powered by CNG and electric vehicles. This percentage exceeds that of the previous contract and shows the commitment of Bilbao City Council and FCC Medio Ambiente to sustainability and care for the environment.

FCC Medio Ambiente proposes a technological and innovative service, coordinated in the new Service Monitoring Centre (CSS from its acronym in Spanish), from which the inspection, monitoring and control of the service will be carried out in real time. This system will be supported by the new technological platform VISION, a computer system for the integrated management of services developed exclusively by the company, which enables live interaction with service incidents and requests from residents, and which is interconnected with the municipal computer systems. Various technological projects will also be developed for the sensorisation of the collection and cleansing tasks, which will automatically and instantaneously provide more precise knowledge and control of the execution of the work.

The new waste collection service, which manages around 143,000 tonnes per year, aims to increase recycling rates for selective collection in order to comply with the objectives of Law 7/2022 on Waste and Polluted Soil, as well as maintaining the positive effect of not saturating containers on the public thoroughfare. To this end, door-to-door selective collection will be promoted for large producers, specifically for the residual and organic fractions for businesses, hotels, restaurants and others; for packaging for producers from community soup-kitchens; and for paper and cardboard for new businesses through the introduction of additional routes. To this end, the launch of awareness campaigns both for the appropriate use of smart bins by citizens and to promote separate collection in the hotels and restaurants sector is planned. 

As for the street cleansing service, which covers an area of over 1,000 kilometres of streets, water treatments will be enhanced by means of sweeping and hydro-cleaning equipment, and the parks and green areas cleaning service will be reinforced, taking on greater importance at weekends and public holidays, when the current service is most lacking. Of particular note is the inroduction of 14 sweepers and 95 washing-down and sweeping trolleys, all of them electric units. In order to ensure that the service achieves the maximum level of productivity, tasks will be readjusted and single-person work teams will be promoted, specifically in the current graffiti removal teams, thus freeing up human resources to redirect them towards the provision of other services.

The new Mercabilbao contract makes a great commitment to an eminently environmentally friendly service, establishing ambitious recycling targets. New sustainable vehicles, the reorganisation of collection routes and awareness-raising campaigns for users are the tools proposed to increase recycling rates, especially separate collection at source. It is worth highlighting the investment in a new watering tanker equipped with the latest water-saving techniques for cleaning the roads and paths in the facilities.