The Torrevieja garbage contract will complete its new fleet before this coming summer | The truth

The new garbage contract begins to pay off its debt in terms of material means. The City Council, together with the concessionaire company, Acciona, presented this Tuesday the new vehicles that it incorporates into the service. In total, more than a hundred hope to be fully operational before this summer; almost two years after the current contract began. The company had a period of one year for implementation.

With the new equipment, the government team and the company wanted to demonstrate that the service takes a new qualitative leap, in particular, the mayor, Eduardo Dolón, highlighted two issues: environmental and acoustics. Faced with frequent neighborhood complaints about noise early in the morning, the councilor explained that the new sweepers and blowers are quieter. In addition, new vehicles are electric or gas, which replaces their older, more polluting diesel counterparts.

In total, the new fleet is made up, as reported by the City Council, of 188 new vehicles: the waste collection service has 39, street cleaning 93 vehicles, beach cleaning in our municipal area a total of 20, eco-park 20 and common services 16 vehicles. Only 15 vehicles are pending delivery, they indicate, “which are already registered and their arrival is expected from next May.”

The City Council estimates the investment assumed by Acciona to renew the fleet at almost 30 million euros (€29,375,579), broken down as follows:

– Waste collection. €11,058,188.

-Road cleaning. €11,452,797.

-Beach cleaning. €3,178,429.

-Gas plant. €686,173.

-Facility. €3,000,000.

“Justice” for workers

The mayor has also addressed the complaints that have arisen from the unions regarding the new hire. Dolón defended that the incorporation of these new vehicles will serve to do justice to a workforce, “who have spent several years of precariousness with obsolete machinery that did not meet the basic requirements to carry out their work,” the mayor of Torrevieja acknowledged.

Selective collection

Eduardo Dolón has also highlighted the awareness and citizen collaboration campaigns that are being carried out. According to the first mayor, these have caused that since last year 2023, compared to 2021 (the last year before putting the new service into operation), there has been an increase of 44% in the selective collection of paper and cardboard, a 94% in the collection of plastic containers, and an increase of 24% in the selective collection of glass. The installation of the brown container for organic waste is still pending, the implementation of which has been postponed.

Of the vehicles acquired, the City Council has revealed, 56 are electric with a zero-emissions label, including electric motorcycles for monitoring the service, high-pressure cleaner vans or open box vans for collecting belongings and reviewing containers. Scrubbers, sweepers and vacuum cleaners have also been incorporated, as well as electric bucket carts that significantly improve the work of operators and the efficiency of manual sweeping work.

More autonomy

The electric vehicles purchased include ranges that vary between 150 and 300 kilometers – in the case of motorcycles and vans – and approximately 9 hours for scrubbers, sweepers and vacuum cleaners. In addition, all batteries “are charged in Acciona facilities equipped with solar panels, guaranteeing that the electricity supply comes from renewable energy. In this way, a significant reduction in emissions is achieved both at the source of energy production and in the work equipment itself.

The City Council also puts figures on the “significant” decrease in the acoustic impact of the waste collection and street cleaning service. “Electric blowers, going from 109 dB to 90 dB, as well as reducing the noise level from 99 dB to 91 dB in the case of sweeping machines.”

The new fleet also incorporates 64 Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) vehicles, which will be recharged at the gas station of the new building that Acciona will build in the Casa Grande industrial estate, in the area adjacent to the ecopark. “This facility will be used exclusively for the service and will reduce refueling times during the service.”

New technologies

The City Council also highlights that, with the new fleet, new technologies are also incorporated to improve efficiency:

GPS Tracking: All vehicles are located by GPS, knowing at all times their positioning on the route, times to complete the routes, and vehicle speeds.

Onboard weighing systems: This system allows us to know the weight of the containers that are collected on the route, in this way we can obtain information on the production of each of the containers and thus be able to optimize containers on each of the routes.

Container geopositioning: All the containers in the municipality are located on maps and we will know how many times that container has been emptied by the collector.

Optimization of routes and fuel consumption: Since all the vehicles are geolocated and we know the routes they take, the times they use to carry out the service, it allows us to adjust the routes, reducing consumption and minimizing the traffic of vehicles from the street collection service.

Sanctions and efforts

The new contract has been highly criticized by the opposition for the deficiencies detected by the external audit hired by the City Council. So far, the City Council has already issued penalties to the company for the non-compliance detected in the service by the external company during last July.

In recent months, Acciona has shown an effort in trying to catch up and implement the improvements it offered during the tender phase. In this sense, some services have already been implemented that have not gone unnoticed by neighbors and passers-by, such as machines capable of dissolving gum stuck to the pavement or the so-called ‘motocaca’ for collecting canine excrement.

The presentation of the new vehicles, on the other hand, came after the PSOE denounced with some images and the results of the ITV inspections that there were trucks that continued in service despite having been registered more than 15 years ago. Something that, the socialists denounced, was very dangerous for the workers.