Canet d'En Berenguer boosts summer cleaning and warns of fines up to €750
In Canet d'En Berenguer, a coastal municipality next to Sagunto in Camp de Morvedre, the town council has added three more cleaning staff for summer and warned of fines up to €750 for leaving bags or furniture by containers.
In peak season, Canet d'En Berenguer can see its population quadruple beyond its registered 8,920 residents, seasonal pressure that has led the town council to reinforce its cleaning service this week. Following several meetings with waste contractor Acciona, the team grows from four to seven staff: one driver and two labourers focused on picking up bags left outside containers, one of the most common summer problems. The measure runs until the end of September.
Mayor Pere Antoni argues that summer cleanliness does not depend on the council alone but also on how residents and tourists behave. The recycling centre near Parque Blasco Ibáñez is extending its opening from one day a week to include Wednesdays and Thursdays too, while the mobile recycling unit still visits the town hall square every third Sunday. Home collection of used cooking oil is paused after the contractor running it shut down, so oil can only be dropped off at the recycling centre until a new contract is awarded.
For the local government, mishandled rubbish is not just an eyesore: it attracts rodents and insects and can affect people with respiratory conditions. Councillor Miguel Ángel Albero notes there is already a free service for collecting old furniture that handles dozens of calls a day, which he says proves that dumping furniture on the street reflects poor civic behaviour rather than a lack of alternatives. Local Police will now enforce fines of up to €750 for these offences.
Canet d'En Berenguer is not an isolated case: several coastal municipalities in Camp de Morvedre, including Sagunto's own beach area, face the same challenge every summer of temporarily scaling up their cleaning teams to cope with a massive influx of visitors. The difference here is that the council has chosen to combine extra staff with a more explicit penalty regime, in an attempt to shift some of the responsibility onto residents' and tourists' individual behaviour.
The council is hoping that the combination of more staff, extended recycling-centre hours and deterrent fines will reduce, before summer ends, the build-up of dumped items and bags that, municipal sources admit, has become the main source of residents' complaints during peak season.
According to El Periódico de Aquí, with data from Wikipedia.