No one wants the used mattresses. They are the first thing that jumps out when purchasing a second-hand housing. They are difficult to transport in a conventional vehicle, expensive to recycle, and expensive even in their eviction, since removing a single mattress for your classification and separation of materials cost around 40 euros. For this reason, do not want to, or the landfill, except for those that are specialized in the treatment of the foam, the fabric that surrounds it, or of iron from its docks. In the region of alicante’s Vega Baja there are many municipalities and no landfill. One of their main cities, Torrevieja, yes there is an eco-park which is free of charge all kinds of waste, including mattresses. But in the area the real estate market is relentless. Full of second homes, in which there is a constant renewal of this appliance.
No one would dare to attribute to a single reason for the surplus of jergones abandoned in the streets torrevejenses. Up to 9.100 have been collected between the months of July, August and September of this year. More than one hundred parts per day that have overflowed the city Hall and its services for the collection of household goods. The councillor of Toilet Urban, Carmen Gómez Candel, seen in this slaughter of domestic “a mystery”. Has sought the answer to the riddle in the establishments of sale of furniture, but everything indicates that the key is not in the city, but the lack of a landfill site that give service to the region north of Alicante.
Mattresses piled in Torrevieja. Pepe Olivares
All of the mattresses that are out on the Torrevieja end up in the ecopark. The municipal company responsible for the collection of waste, Acciona, the moves up to this point clean, located next to the Local Police station and near Fire station, in one of the exit routes of the city. Until there came this summer, a truck loaded of jergones, with up to 50 every two hours. There are three workers, such as Omós and Moses, which is dedicated exclusively to disassemble the mattresses. This summer had not stopped for a moment in their workday. The placed horizontally, the wound knife, separate the fabric of the wrap and the foam and pull with a hook the fabric that is stitched to the piers of iron.
The material ends up in various landfills. “The foam rubber and the fabrics are going to different landfills, as Alicante or Albacete”, account Framework Guirao, responsible for the ecopark. “The iron is going to a casting, Orihuela or Murcia”, follows. The metal is difficult to remove and your price is low. Despite the overabundance of mattresses in the streets of the city, gathering a ton to base of piers is not easy. Nor quick. The traffic of materials is constant. Guirao and the rest of the employees of this service do not stop a moment, between the mountains of furniture, glass, appliances and, of course, mattresses.
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While the charge of the ecopark in talks with THE COUNTRY, arrives in another truck that has collected jergones through the neighborhoods of The High and The Balconies, surrounding the hospital of Torrevieja. Download 32 parts Omós and Moses are quick to stack and sort. In the judgment of Guirao, there are three reasons that are both mattress abandoned. The new homeowners, “they leave them in the street, although it doesn’t cost much to bring them here, or notify the municipal enterprise”. The landfills of the province and of the provinces neighboring “charge a lot for [take care of] each mattress”. Up to 40 euros per unit. And, finally, the individuals and “companies that come from outside.” From other towns of the region.
Here comes into play the political corruption. In the Vega Baja, where they live more than 275,000 people, there is no landfill. The great trial pending in the province, the case Brugal, which involved in one of its multiple ramifications to an employer of Orihuela, Ángel Fenoll, and his alleged shady business with politicians of the PP municipal and provincial, he left the south of Alicante without a trash can. Also is pending the commissioning of a plant of waste transfer in the zone, but the mayors of the region do not agree at the time of posting its final location. Conclusion: there is no landfill. In Torrevieja there is a clean point that comes to mattresses, but burial is expensive, and in the ecopark is free.
The main losers of this heap of mattresses on the public right of way, which begins each day as in the myth of Sisyphus, are the neighbors. In the Turret II, the neighborhood next to the ecopark, can swarm back “up to 60 or 70 mattresses every day,” said Guirao. Two of them remain in the soil, on the side of a trash container in which also someone has thrown a couple of small furniture. Joseph and Aicha, residents of the neighborhood, waiting for the bus that takes you to the city center in the stop that is next to the full container. “We do not know where they have gone, or if they are infected or not,” says Joseph. The citizens are fed up with. “Above all, it is a question of health”, he says.
In the Turret, it is very suspicious the location of the jergones helpless. “They are always on this street, the more outside”, he continues, “as if they know that the neighborhood is a maze in which there is hardly any output”. Manuel, whose home is near the container, a further step in his argument. “This mattress gives a bad reputation to the neighborhood,” he says. “I’ve been living 30 years here and I’m not going,” he says, “but then it always comes out in the newspapers for things like this”. The Turret II is an old neighborhood, houses with affordable prices. “It is a poor neighborhood like any other”, protest Manuel, “and mattresses in all of the sites. There is No law.” In his opinion, the jergones “come from other peoples”. “That throw know that near are no collection points and junkyards, and have been accustomed to come here” sentence.
