“It’s true that in the early hours of the morning it’s often dirty,” admits a student from Toulouse who came to lunch on Friday noon on the steps of Place Saint-Pierre, with a view of the Garonne. Behind him, as in a crime scene, the town hall has marked out part of the stairs where beer cans, fast food packaging and a whole bunch of other waste lie. A polluted area, like the one that the cleaning service of the town hall finds every morning on the square, the Quai de la Daurade and the promenade that connects them.
Faced with this overabundance of waste left by the drunken night owls behind them after each evening, the town hall of Toulouse decided to mark the spirits during a punch operation.
“We want to raise awareness and show the result of soiling. Tonight, when the night owls come, they won’t be able to use that part of the stairs. When you have an idyllic setting, you have to respect it, ”asserts Emilion Esnault, deputy mayor responsible for the Coordination of policies for the good performance of public spaces.
400 kg each evening
Each year, in these popular places of the festivities, the cleaning service spends 4,000 hours cleaning and picking up rubbish, ie “100,000 euros in payroll just to clean up what others have soiled”, underlines the elected official. A real black spot, during the start of the student year, and when the weather is right, the area welcomes thousands of young people in the evening. And every evening, they leave 400 kg of bottles and other waste on the ground.
“Every evening, we dine here and we drink, we take ownership of the place and it’s true that there is a lot of dirt. But this operation will be useless if they do it only once. It would take something more permanent, a presence to dissuade throwing, ”says Camille, a student who lives in the neighborhood. For now, the Capitol has mainly planned to double the collection points by adding selective sorting, as well as collectors. As for the establishment of a mediation on the subject, Emilion Esnault is dubious. “We have already tried it with the noise and it did not work”, assures the elected official who indicates that thousands of tickets are issued each year for throwing cigarette butts, waste or even urination on the public highway .
A local woman who passes by the apostrophe. For her, it’s not just the Saint-Pierre and Daurade quays that pose a problem. This noisy and messy nightlife phenomenon has moved to nearby streets.