In the municipality of Soure I know of three places where you can get rid of your waste. That was accompanied by a substantial european subsidy, and was thought up at the drawing board, but it does work.
You can drop off all your waste there
Great initiative. Before that, the alternatives were: leave it in the shed behind your house until the bacteria and mice have eaten it (and that can take a while) or dump it somewhere in the forest. If you don’t have a shed, your only option. You do a nice walk with your dog, enjoying the peace and quiet and singing birds in the forest, and then you feast your eyes on a refrigerator rusting away. Or you come across half a house in pieces. Or household goods.
Much less fun for your experience of nature, and also not good for the forest. The municipality of Soure wanted a solution for that, and convinced Brussels to invest more than 800.000 euros in it. If you’re an engineer sitting behind your computer, you’re probably very proud of yourself for coming up with this. A fenced area that you can drive around – in one gate, out the other – where an official is present to make sure that everything goes well, that you are indeed putting your stuff in the right bins.
Eight hundred thousand is quite a lot for a small asphalt road, a glass bin, a paper bin, a plastic bin, a lamp bin, a clothes bin, a large container, a shed made of OSB with a door that can be locked (I think: for a supervisor = employment!) and a fence around it. Okay, eight hundred thousand maybe for the three facilities. Together with the “development costs” it’s a reasonable amount.
One has to remain realistic. Nobody works for nothing.
Now it was a success, and that’s also what caused it to fail. They dumped entire households of deceased nanas, made redundant-because-of-outcompeted garages, the mess of a newly plastered and painted house, the rubble from a renovation, and a lot of old mattresses. Far too much for the Municipality to process, so it was always full.
That’s great, you might say, at least that waste is not in the woods
Come and clean a few more times, Municipality!
But the Municipality didn’t think it was great at all. No one ended up in that shed of OSB anyway, so no jobs and no supervision, and without authority – everyone knows that – “they” just do whatever they want. Then they just throw it down, that old suitcase with all grandma’s dresses, and the broken coffee maker you bought on AliExpress two months ago.
That was not the intention, citizens! Those dresses should go in the clothes bin, and that broken coffee maker in the bin for the broken “eletrodomésticos”, loosely translated: all those gadgets that you use once or twice in a year (or in your life) in the kitchen or bathroom with a plug on it.
Our sub-municipality – the Junta de Freguesia of Vinha da Rainha – had enough, and they took action.
Now, on my walks, I regularly pass the one behind the cemetery towards the pastelaria in Vinha da Rainha. Since I had found a few nice things there when I brought rubble and junk, I sometimes walk that little bit further to see if there is anything interesting there. An old cupboard with beautifully worked wood, a new super bed base, a beautiful lamp … this lamp was put very delicately on top of a pile of junk (“Take me with you, please!”) and I really couldn’t leave it there.
The last time, however, I came across a fence, with a sign on it, that said that you first have to make an appointment with the Junta. What any person with common sense could have told you right away, but what officials apparently always miss: that didn’t work. The result of this official action was that everyone threw their rubbish over the fence, or left it next to the site.
Well, at least no waste in the forest ….
Fortunately, the Junta came to its senses fairly quickly. The container is accessible again, the fence is now next to it, so you can no longer throw anything away next to the facility.
There is still no supervisor in the OSB-shed …. what the original intention was. Maybe still worth considering? Municipality? Junta?
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We moved here in 2000 from Rotterdam, Holland to the Termas-da-Azenha, Portugal.
A big step, especially with two small children.
We are busy to rebuild one of portugals cultural heirlooms: Termas-da-Azenha, an old spa which has been turned into several holiday houses, rooms and a campsite.
You’ll find mosaics and paintings everywhere.
Since 2018 we call ourselves the first B&B&B in the world – Bed & Breakfast & Bathrobes. You can buy a home-made unique bathrobe/housecoat with us.
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