Hundreds of dead animals picked up from Maltese roads

Pigs do not fly, but in Malta you may find their carcasses scattered by the wayside - some 1,000 dead cows, horses, cats, dogs and other animals were collected from the roads between January and June.

Public cleansing employees collected a whopping 9.4 tons of rubbish from the roads alone in the first six months of the year.

Luckily, conscientious citizens do exist and the door-to-door bulky refuse service responded to 8,000 calls and collected 21,000 items. These included 1,635 mattresses, 4,597 household appliances and 4,039 items of furniture. The workers also removed 11,000 posters from the roads.

Maltese arterial roads are set to get a clean sweep after the government invested €428,000 in cleaning equipment, which the Public Cleansing Department will use to cover around 450 kilometres of arterial roads.

Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi and Rural Affairs Minister George Pullicino visited to department to see the machinery bought from the UK - eight tipper vans, nine trucks, three mechanical sweepers, a loading van, two refuse vehicles, a skip loader, 10 skips, two vans and two loaders.

In a separate clean-up campaign, more than 47.5 tons of bulky waste was removed from fields and rubble walls in nine towns.

The clean-up, jointly run by the planning authority's enforcement section and the Resources Authority's Parks unit, involved collecting oil drums, white goods and wooden pallets dumped near rubble walls.

Żurrieq ranked as the locality with the largest bulk removed from the countryside after 19.5 tons were collected, followed by 10.5 tons in Qrendi.

The majority of the items in all the localities - 1,755 - were removed by the owners after they received a notification from the Malta Environment and Planning Authority. Another 381 objects were removed by Parks officials.

One ton of rubbish was removed from Rabat, eight tons from Safi and another four tons from Ħandaq.

In the 226 identified sites, 59 enforcement notices were issued to owners requesting them to clean up their property. There were still 1,996 items that were still not cleared - with Luqa topping the list with 1,188.