The city government of San Sebastián, Spain, has awarded FCC an 8-year contract to provide street cleaning services in the city. The contract is worth a total of 86 million euro.

FCC won the contract in competition with two other large Spanish companies, as its bid received the highest score from the city's technical experts, whose decision was ratified by the governing council. The contract will require an estimated 5 million euro in investment.

FCC will have a staff of 212 people to provide cleaning services in San Sebastián, which has a population of 183,000. A novel feature of this contract is that FCC will employ an environmental inspector to report and raise awareness among the city's residents about the proper use of the city government's waste management and maintenance services.

FCC will also develop a computer application to enable the city government to have direct, up-to-date information about any incidents and about the progress of the street-cleaning services. The application will be freely accessible to all citizens via the web.

FCC will provide a fleet of 300 cleaning vehicles, including bin trolleys, street sweepers, inspection vans, street washers, and special cleaning vans and trucks.

Instead of mains water, the company will use recycled water or groundwater. For this purpose, FCC will install six tanks at various points around the city to refill the street washing vehicles. The tanks will be filled with treated wastewater from the Loyola plant, supplied in 20 cubic-metre trucks. The company also plans to prospect for underground water sources.

There will be an urgent cleaning service available round the clock using a cutting-edge cleaning vehicle designed by FCC's own machinery department.

In parallel, FCC will take charge of removing municipal solid waste and providing cleaning services on the beaches of La Concha, Ondarreta, Zurriola and the island of Santa Clara, and of removing flotsam and jetsam from the adjacent waters.

With this contract, FCC now handles street cleaning in the three big cities of the Basque Country-Bilbao, San Sebastián and Vitoria-and in 75 towns in the Basque Country.

FCC companies provide urban sanitation and cleaning services in approximately 4,000 municipalities in Spain, other European countries, Africa and the Americas, serving about 50 million people; it is the leader in this field in Spain and one of the principal players in Latin America.