Marbella council is cracking down on environmental offences. After spending 15 months and more than 150,000 euros on campaigns to raise awareness of the importance of keeping the streets clean, the Department of Cleaning and the Environment has now moved on from prevention and is taking a firm hand. Since new controls were put into force recently to ensure that people comply with the regulations, 84 fines have been issued, totalling 32,100 euros. These controls are carried out by just one plain clothes officer from the Local Police force, and a team of environmental officers who watch out like hawks for offenders.

Between the 15th of September and the 15th of October, the council issued 36 fines for putting rubbish into containers at the wrong time of day, leaving rubbish outside the containers or leaving items in the public street. Twenty-five fines were imposed on pet owners who allowed their animals to defecate in the street and didn’t clean up after them, and a further 23 fines were issued to the owners of plots of land which are covered in weeds or contain rubble or rubbish.

In the first of these cases, the fines range from 100 euros for a householder who puts their rubbish into the container outside the official hours for doing so, which are between 9 and 11 p.m., and 600 euros for hotels and other businesses which do the same, but who are disposing of much larger quantities.

Rubbish left outside

The council is also fining people who leave their rubbish outside the containers, those who leave garden refuse such as tree cuttings around the bins, and those who decide to leave domestic electrical items and grandma’s sofa beside the rubbish containers because they can’t be bothered to phone the Town Hall to have them collected. Dog owners, on the other hand, are having to pay up to 300 euros for not picking up their pets’ excrement from the street.

Antonio Espada, the councillor for the Environment, says that since the local authority began issuing the fines, pet owners are “beginning to take notice”. It seems that hitting people in the wallet is rather more effective than appealing to their civic conscience. The Environmental Department is prepared to go on fining people for these types of offence, because they affect everybody and give the town a bad image. However, the informative campaigns will still continue to try to warn people against committing the offences and appeal to their sense of responsibility.

The main problem at the moment is tree cuttings. The team of environmental officers, which is formed by six people, is on the alert for the large amounts of garden refuse which are thrown alongside the rubbish containers. The problem, according to Antonio Espada, is that the rubbish collection lorries are not equipped to collect this type of refuse. Householders are therefore advised to tell the companies which carry out this type of work to take the cuttings to the Environmental Treatment Centre, or to do it themselves via their community of owners.

Regards