How rubbish is collected in a city built on water

Sixty thousand tourists arrive here every day, leaving behind a lot of rubbish. There are no rubbish trucks in the city, as space is limited and there is naturally no place to store rubbish.

Garbage collection in Venice begins daily at dawn. At 6:00 a.m. in St. Mark's Square, 180 people begin to clean up about 100 tonnes of rubbish left behind by yesterday's tourists. They have less than four hours to collect and transport it from the floating city to the mainland. A street sweeper would be useful, but vehicles are banned from Venice's narrow streets, so the rubbish is collected by hand from hundreds of shops, cafés, hotels and thousands of homes. Venice has very strict rules about rubbish, so certain types of rubbish are collected on certain days.

Garbage point

The next problem is to remove all the rubbish from the city before the tourists arrive. In another city, a rubbish truck would be used, but this is Venice, and here a fleet of 66 manoeuvrable barges is needed. Each of these boats is 2.5 metres wide so that it can squeeze through the narrow canals without any problems; a flat bottom to cope with shallow water and enough power to carry up to 5 tonnes of rubbish. There are 160 rubbish collection points throughout the city, where workers lift a special container with an opening bottom on board.

This is how rubbish is collected in Venice

Boatmen and rubbish collectors must work quickly and smoothly, as they have until 9:30 a.m. to leave the canals before the tourist gondolas arrive. Venice's canals are narrow and confusing, so boatmen must be agile and attentive to make 90-degree turns and avoid costly collisions.

Venice - Garbage transport

The next question is, what to do with the barges loaded with rubbish? The answer lies on the neighbouring island of Saccà San Biagio. Here, the contents of the containers are dumped onto larger 50-metre-long barges. Soon, 2,400 cubic metres of municipal waste are sent to a waste processing plant. First, the huge piles of rubbish are dried, and only after seven days are they ready for incineration.

Around 70,000 tonnes of this recycled fuel are sent to the nearby Fuzina power station each year to generate electricity for Venice.

Fusina Hydrogen-Fueled Plant

Today, up to 10 per cent of the city's electricity is generated from waste, lighting the streets and canals so that tourists can see where to throw their rubbish at night.