The El Prat de Llobregat City Council and FCC Medio Ambiente (the Spanish brand for FCC Environment) have signed a new eight-year, €68 million contract for delivering street cleansing and refuse collection services. As usual for contracts of this sort, this is El Prat de Llobregat's largest tender economically. The services are expected to begin immediately.

To service the city 65,000 inhabitants, the company will roll out a staff of 120 workers and invest over €10 million in 46 vehicles and 2,000 containers for waste collection, prominently including eight refuse collection compactors with different volume capacities, four lightweight selective collection vehicles, and another closed-box vehicle for bulky items and container distribution.

The cleaning service will entail 15 cage-box tipper vehicles and eight high-pressure water and tanker vehicles. This contract also includes the operation of the fixed network of recycling centres known as deixallerias.

The proposal that FCC Medio Ambiente submitted was according to the sustainable public contracting criteria of the City Council's tender process and entailed active measures to foster gender equality and combat social exclusion, which were contemplated as essential when designing the services.

The proposal also incorporated the possibility of the City Council and FCC jointly developing services according to emerging technological innovations in the waste industry and the potential use of clean energy vehicles running on electricity or Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) with a view to shoring up the sustainability of the services.

The contract award means the company will resume providing waste collection and street cleaning services after 17 years to El Prat de Llobregat, where the corporate headquarters of FCC Medio Ambiente Cataluña I Branch and the FCC Group's central archive in Cataluña are located.