The city of Girona has begun implementing a new waste collection system using smart containers. From now on, there will be a separate container for each type of waste, and residents can dispose of their waste any day of the week and at any time of day. An identification card is still required to open the containers.

In 2026, Girona will begin a significant change in its waste collection system. After months of neighborhood complaints, antisocial behavior, and dirty streetsThe Girona city council has decided to put an end to the revolution of the multi-fraction container model, implemented just a year agoThis system, a pioneering one in Catalonia, required residents to dispose of each type of waste—plastic, organic, paper, or general waste—in a specific container, which could only be opened with a smart card, according to a schedule set for each day of the week. However, the model failed to gain traction with the public, and litter scattered around the containers has been a constant problem. Therefore, starting this January, the classic colored containers, one for each type of waste, are returning, allowing residents to dispose of the corresponding waste any day and at any time of the week. The smart card is still required to open the containers. The external company responsible for the city's waste collection service is Girona +Neta, and to implement these substantial changes, the city council had to modify the contract inherited from the previous administration of former mayor Marta Madrenes. During the first months of implementation, the new tripartite governing team has already made specific modifications and applied sanctions to the company for service malfunctions, but this latest measure is the most drastic. As the months have passed, it has become clear that the original contract terms failed to anticipate the enormous complexity of changing the entire waste collection system in a city of over 100,000 inhabitants, so the City Council has had to react as events unfolded. This is especially true in response to complaints and apathy from some residents, who, the dirtier the city became, the less they cooperated, leaving furniture, appliances, and all kinds of trash in the streets as a form of protest and boycott. "We haven't obtained the cooperation we expected," the municipal government acknowledges. In fact, during 2025, the Municipal Police issued more than 1,000 fines for violations of the waste ordinance.

Since Girona changed the waste collection system with smart containersBy early 2025, garbage has become the city's biggest headache. For months now, the Girona capital hasn't had the traditional color-coded recycling bins. Instead, it's been multi-fraction containers opened with a personal card, and only the type of waste (containers, paper, waste, sanitary textiles, or organic materials) specified on the calendar can be disposed of. Similarly, in neighborhoods with lower waste density, there are door-to-door collections or mixed systems, while businesses, which generate a large amount of waste, must also manage their garbage on a specific schedule. However, seven months later, walking around the city, it's clear that this new collection system hasn't worked as expected.

From Barcelona, I've been following the discontent in Girona over the garbage collection system implemented by the City Council, which Mayor Salellas has now partially rectified, seeing that many residents ended up throwing their garbage any day in any container or next to any container. The same thing happened in some districts of Barcelona some time ago.

When it rains cats and dogs, in English you can say, among other expressions, "It's raining cats and dogs". A literal translation, which makes no sense in Catalan, would be: "It's raining cats and dogs." In Birmingham, the second largest city in the United Kingdom, what is falling now are rats and cats, not cats and dogs. ,000 tons of rubbish, the result of the four weeks of uninterrupted strike by municipal service workers, which are added to the days of intermittent stoppages they have carried out since January 4. The situation is so serious from the point of view of public health that last Monday, the local authority of the capital the city of the Peaky Blindersdeclared a state of emergency. So far, nothing has been noticed; everything remains the same, residents complain. In some districts and neighborhoods—Aston, Small Heath, Witton, Acocks Green, Bordesley Green, and Allens Cross—the problem is more than evident. These are areas where residents often lack the resources to pay for a private cleaning service—it can cost up to 240 pounds a week—and where they also cannot rent construction containers to accumulate bags and more bags while waiting for the conflict to be resolved.