Cleaning squad will attend to clandestine trails and dumps in Bogotá, know how to report them

The Mayor's Office of Bogotá announced that the Special Administrative Unit for Public Services (UAESP), together with the secretariats of Social Integration, Culture, Recreation and Sport and the District Institute for Children and Youth (IDIPRON), created the Cleaning Squad to raise awareness among citizens about the importance of keep public space clean and tidy.

This is due to the fact that the work of more than six thousand toilet workers has been hindered, who travel through the 20 towns of the city sweeping, cleaning, collecting and washing streets, parks and in general the entire public space, collecting more than 273 tons of waste, a weight equivalent to that of eight bi-articulated buses of TransMilenio.

This team will be made up of 980 young people belonging to the Parceros program of the Secretariat for Social Integration, who will travel through 19 of the 20 towns in response to complaints of trails and clandestine throws that citizens report through the website uaesp.gov.co/juntoscuidamosbogota.

In this way, once the complaint is reported, the squad will go to the place to clean and care for the space with the community.

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“With this strategy we want to call on citizens to take care of the public space of the city together. We can put 100 thousand people with brooms and compactor cars with the costs that this implies, but without the support and co-responsibility of citizens, Bogotá will be dirty and neglected. To this end, we call on the people of Bogota to report these waste trails on our website. So, you report, we clean and together we take care of Bogotá,” explained Luz Amanda Camacho, director of the UAESP.

For Henry Murrain, Undersecretary of Citizen Culture and Knowledge Management, it is very important that citizens acquire “behavioral changes, such as caring for the environment, the correct separation of waste and the maintenance of our parks and common places; aspects that allow us to have a healthy coexistence and be part of the change to build together the city we need.”

The mayor's office specified that in 2021, the district, through the UAESP, spent 30 billion pesos on payments for the collection and transportation of this type of waste abandoned on the streets of the city.

“With the money that we must pay to private individuals to collect the rubble that some people leave in the public space, we could build a mega-school or a park similar to Gilma Jiménez in Kennedy, which has more than 8 hectares of recreational and sports areas,” Camacho said.

The strategy will have a component designed to improve the attention currently being paid to the so-called Critical Points, places where construction waste, furniture and other large volume items are clandestine dumped.

In addition, UAESP will install Ecopoints in different locations in order to provide citizens with an option so that they can dispose of this waste free of charge without having to leave it on the street and affecting the city and everyone's pocket. Initially, they will be in the towns of Suba and Fontibon.

Likewise, the UAESP is optimizing not only the channels of attention to citizens who wish to request the collection and transport service of this waste, but has organized work tables with the city's toilet operators with the aim of optimizing and improving this service by making it more accessible to users.

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