The Arrecife City Council has launched a cleaning campaign for vacant lots and open areas that are being used illegally as dumps, starting with the Argana Alta neighborhood, which is one of the most affected. In this area alone, the City Council states that it removed 68 tons of debris last February.
"The campaign will continue until September 30 at all illegal waste dumping points in Arrecife," say sources from the City Council's Cleaning Department, which estimates that there are 164 points throughout the municipality.
The Mayor of Arrecife, Astrid Pérez, has appealed to the civic-mindedness of the residents because "the capital of Lanzarote and the Biosphere cannot be the dumping point for debris from the entire island, which is what is happening". She has also requested "citizen collaboration to avoid these uncivil actions."
"The vacant lots and open areas of Arrecife, such as the road between Maneje and Argana, are used by people without civic awareness to deposit concrete, bricks, tiles, and all kinds of ceramic and construction materials; when there are authorized clean points to dispose of this debris," added the Councilor for Cleaning, Roberto Herbón.
The action being undertaken by the City Council consists of cleaning and treating dumps and maintaining and improving urban and rural spaces. For these works, the Cleaning Department uses tray-carrying trucks, sacks to deposit the debris, and transports them to the Zonzamas Environmental Complex, previously selected, so that they are not mixed with other materials.
The cleaning of illegal dumps is part of the Lanzarote Ecological Transition Employment Plan 2021 (PETE 2021), agreed with the Cabildo of Lanzarote, for the conditioning, cleaning, and maintenance of different natural spaces of Lanzarote.