Marseille under the garbage, known painting. But the situation caused by the garbage collectors’ strike, the third in four months, has reached the limits of what is bearable for the mayor. “In an exceptional situation, an exceptional response”, estimates Benoît Payan, who announces that he will “act urgently” from this Tuesday trucks for “pick up the surplus garbage cans that block the streets”. According to Provencenearly 3,000 tons of waste are waiting to be picked up in the streets of several districts of the second city of France.
Ecological disaster
“We have been facing a garbage crisis for four months which is taking on dangerous proportions: dozens of garbage fires [certains habitants préférant brûler leurs déchets, ndlr] since this weekend and a mistral at more than 100 km / h”, justifies the mayor (PS) of Marseille, in a press release published Monday evening. “All the elements are there to rush us towards a safe and ecological drama”according to the city councilor, who says he is forced to “get out of the legal framework to protect the Marseillaises and the Marseillais”by mobilizing “extraordinary derogatory means to preserve public health”.
From this Tuesday, “the municipality will have companies intervene urgently to protect the health and safety of Marseillaises and Marseillais in order to collect the surplus garbage cans which block the streets and which constitute a risk of fire and a danger of pollution of water and environments natural», explains Benoît Payan. With the wind, the municipality says it fears that large quantities of plastic will land in the Mediterranean Sea. In October, during a first strike, torrential rains carried tons of waste piled up in the streets to the sea, causing an ecological disaster. Several hundred volunteers were then mobilized to clean the beaches.
“A security measure”
Waste collection is a competence that normally falls to the Aix-Marseille-Provence metropolis, led by Martine Vassal, of the Les Républicains party. The latter, to whom the administrative court of Marseille agreed on Saturday, had summoned the FO union, the majority in the city and the metropolis, the day before in order to request the lifting of the blockages of the transfer centers and garages where are stored dump trucks, preventing non-strikers from working freely. “The mayor does not wish to take a position in this social conflict, but this exceptional decision to mobilize private means is a security measure”insists the town hall team.
This new waste collection strike, which began on January 18, is the third in four months in Marseille. FO considers that certain provisions of a previous agreement concluded at the end of December with all the trade unions around the application of the 35 hours are not respected. If the second city of France has experienced many garbage collectors’ strikes for twenty years, citizens’ associations are increasingly mobilized to demand a different management of cleanliness. A Facebook page, Poubelle la vie, denouncing the waste problem has more than 20,000 subscribers.