The Maldonado mayor’s office held this week the opening of bids for the public bidding to contract the waste collection service in that department.
They presented themselves to the call two offers. One was from the company Partry SA (Qualix Ecotecno) that currently provides the service, and for an amount of $61,274,500 per month (almost US$ 1.6 million per month).
The second offer was submitted Teyma Environmental Management SA, for an amount of $69,633,752 per month (around US$ 1.8 million per month), according to the mayor’s office. Other related services are not included in any of the cases.
The other company that had bought the document for a value of US$ 50,000 was the Taym firm, which ultimately did not attend the instance.
The adjudication process will now continue with the study of the economic and technical proposals by an advisory commission specially designated for this tender.
The winning company will provide the waste collection service for a period of 10 years throughout the department.
“In Maldonado, growth is expected that must be accompanied. There will be new technology to improve the service, a whole new issue of recyclables, and then other washing systems, which is one of the shortcomings that the service has today,” said the general director of Environmental Management.Jorge Píriz at a press conference.
On the other hand, emphasis is placed on “the part that is bulky and scattered around the containers,” he said.
At present the mayor pays some US$1.2 million per month for the valet trash service.
New Containers
The call establishes that the initial number of containers should grow over the years, based on the increase in new subdivisions in the department.
In this sense, Píriz said that “the renewal will be total” and 5,000 new containers are initially being requested from the company that obtains the exploitation of the service, more trucks and other equipment. The tender only covers transportation to final disposal at the plant located in Las Rosas, which is part of another project that is being studied.
This is the most onerous concession that the municipal administration has. This since the former mayor Domingo Burgueño authorized the company Sol Ingeniería Ambiental between 1990 and 1995 to provide the service, Diario Correo of Punta del Este had pointed out.
“The worst business for a city is that it is dirty”
“In 2001 we were the first to bring containers to Uruguay. (…) We have no problems with vandalism, in some there is the issue of scavengers, but it is quite controlled. Here the garbage from the entire department is collected and centralized in a single place”, Mayor Enrique Antía had said to The Observer last January.
“The worst business for a city is that it is dirty. You can’t do it with municipal officials. If companies don’t do things right, we take them out,” he added.
The services for the future concessionaire include: automated lateral collection of household waste, semi-automated collection of recyclable waste, waste collection from large generators, in this case with a stationary compactor box and a manual system, bulky, scattered and dead animal waste collection .
