The Salamanca City Hall Plenary Session agreed today to award FCC with the city cleaning and refuse collection services for the next 12 years. The amount of this contract amounts to 186 million Euros.

Three companies put in tenders for the contest announced by the City Hall. The FCC offer obtained 97.6 points in the municipal technical services report, whereas the second company achieved 70 and the third 55.9.

To carry out these services, FCC will have to invest 19 million Euros in the construction of a new central yard and the purchasing of the vehicles needed to carry out the services.

The new machinery yard will have solar-powered hot water and a system to purify the water from the washing of vehicles for its later reuse.

60 vehicles will be acquired for the cleaning of the city and 31 for refuse collection, all of which will include built-in GPS locating systems.

The refuse lorries will be driven by compressed natural gas (CNG) engines, far less contaminating and noisy than conventional engines, and will be fitted with a side loading system.

100 islands will be placed throughout the whole city for underground refuse skips.

FCC began these Urban Cleaning activities in 1911, with refuse collection in Barcelona, a service it still renders. It has been present in Salamanca from 1972 and since then has won successive contests called by the different corporations that have governed the city.

It carries out these activities (refuse collection and treatment, road cleaning, cleaning of buildings and maintenance of green spaces)in approximately 4,000 towns in Europe, Africa and America, where around 50 million people live. In Spain alone, it is present in 3,420 towns, among which are a large number of provincial capitals, such as Albacete, Alicante, Avila, Barcelona, Bilbao, Ceuta, Cuenca, Gerona, Jaen, Las Palmas, Madrid, Malaga, Melilla, Oviedo, Pamplona, Salamanca, San Sebastian, Segovia, Tarragona, Valencia, Valladolid and Vitoria.

This award, together with that recently achieved in Madrid, strengthens FCC?s leadership in these environmental activities in Spain even more, activities from which it invoiced 1,980 million Euros in 2005.