Trucks will be mobilized “in an emergency” to try to pick up the tons of waste that litter the streets of several districts of the city.
“In an exceptional situation, an exceptional response”: the mayor of Marseille Benoît Payan announced that he would “act urgently” from Tuesday trucks for “pick up the surplus garbage cans that block the streets”, due to a new garbage collectors’ strike.
Read alsoDespite the order to unblock, the garbage collectors’ strike gets bogged down in Marseille
Thousands of tons of waste litter the streets of several districts of France’s second city following a strike, the third in four months, by garbage collectors, notably at the call of the Force Ouvrière (FO) union. “We have been facing a garbage crisis for four months which is taking on dangerous proportions: dozens of garbage can fires since this weekend and a mistral at more than 100 km / h”, said Benoît Payan in a press release Monday evening. Some residents, fed up with the piles of waste, prefer to burn them, explained the town hall team.
“All the elements are there to rush us towards a safe and ecological drama”, according to the city councilor representing a left-wing coalition, 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”. Waste collection is a competence that normally falls to the Aix-Marseille-Provence metropolis, led by Martine Vassal, of the Les Républicains party.
Risk of water pollution
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. “After a new municipal decree issued last Friday, as of this evening, bailiffs are mandated by the city to note the disturbances to public order caused by the presence on the public highway of a lot of waste and the lack of waste collection”, detailed the town hall. From 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», he adds.
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. “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”, insisted to AFP the team of the town hall.
Third strike in four months
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.