Clean sweep: How residents are helping make Brussels a tidier place

Sipping his morning coffee in the Barbeton cafe just across the canal from Molenbeek, Barry Sandland makes no claim that he’s on a crusade to clean up his neighbourhood. “I ride a bicycle and I don’t have a car, but I’m not rabid,” says the 50-something Canadian who moved to Belgium from Toronto in 1999.

“I think I’ve just always been on the green side of things. Grow flowers, keep your street clean, recycle stuff, don’t buy what you can’t afford – I’m that kind of guy. The garden is just something to keep me busy.”

Sandland’s urban garden is on an empty parcel of land in Rue Fin, opposite the loft where he lives. “It was an old car park and the owners couldn’t run it anymore,” he says, “so it became an abandoned lot with just one truck in it.”

Broken fridges, kitchen cabinets and tables littered the ground, so he asked the owners if he could take a metre alongside the fence and put a garden in. “They basically said do whatever you want.” He dug a trench, bought some soil and started growing roses, tulips and daffodils. “Now the people who live there, instead of seeing piles of garbage and debris, they see a garden.”

Two years on, the plot has given him the opportunity to get to know his neighbourhood. “The lady who lives next door offered to take some of the garbage away, and I thought to myself, I love you, this is fantastic. Then one day I was working there and a guy came up and offered me a bottle of water. Then a little kid came with a tray and a teapot on it and I had Moroccan tea for lunch.”

The narrow strip of flowers isn’t the only one in the area. Down the street another neighbour runs an even more impressive plot with statues and murals, and Rue Fin has its very own informal garden society. Despite his unwavering optimism, however, Sandland is under no illusion that Molenbeek is devoid of problems.

“I attended a meeting once where fifty of my neighbours voiced their complaints about people who drive here from miles away, knowing full well that Molenbeek is a dump area, pulling their vans over and throwing out their entire remade kitchens, just stacking them up and waiting for the city to come and take them away.”

Illegal dumping is a dilemma for Molenbeek. In 2014 alone, the local public cleaning department collected over 2,000 tons of abandoned rubbish – including couches and kitchen appliances – at a total cost of more than €250,000. It’s no surprise then that many of the street sweepers Sandland has met in his neighbourhood feel overwhelmed and overstretched.

Poor track record

And Molenbeek isn’t even the worst when it comes to rubbish. Nearby Schaerbeek, with just 40,000 more inhabitants, collects nearly twice as much illegal waste every year. And overall, the Brussels region doesn’t have much to boast about. In a 2012 report conducted by the Belgian consumer organisation Test-Achats, neighbouring Anderlecht and the City of Brussels ranked as the dirtiest places in Belgium. In another report by the European Commission from 2010, of the 75 European cities surveyed, only five urban areas performed worse than Brussels in terms of cleanliness. In Western Europe, only Athens and Palermo were dirtier.

The situation has improved since, but progress is slow, held up by a number of underlying issues. “Just look at how complex Brussels is,” says Helena de Groot, a Belgian journalist living in California. “You have nineteen different municipalities and they each have their own rules and regulations and teams of street cleaners, and
then you have Bruxelles-Propreté, or the regional authority, that has its own cleaners who sweep the big arteries and collect the bags. On top of that, cleanliness around public transportation is overseen by the transit authorities. As a result, you might have a street where one end is cleaned by the municipality, the other by the region, and in the middle you might have a tram stop.”

This is also a transit city, she points out. “A lot of people are here for shorter periods of time or come from very diverse levels of society. Either they don’t get attached enough to care or they don’t know what the rules are and might not have legal ways of finding them out. So if they see other people littering on the street, they’ll do it too.”

Three years ago, while living here, de Groot made a radio documentary on the topic of dirty Brussels. “On top of all that, you also have a host of other issues, such as the ones related to subletting,” she says. “I visited certain areas where you have families of six, seven people living in tiny one-room apartments in dire conditions. Recycling is arguably not their first priority. And if you see how little physical space they have, you realise that if they have to throw some trash away, well they just can’t wait for the collection day and have to put it outside.”

Prevention v repression

Solving the problem of rubbish can be a daunting task, but one neighbourhood believes it has found the right recipe. Schaerbeek, the second-largest municipality in Brussels, has combined two seemingly opposite philosophies of prevention and repression to combat illegal dumping.

The local cleaning department has one team responsible for educating residents. They organise school visits where they clean the streets with pupils and teach them to respect the community and the street sweepers who are part of it. “The children need to know that the Coke can they throw on the ground doesn’t disappear magically, it’s Mustafa, or Mamadou, or Paul who has to pick it up,” says Geert Pierre, assistant head of Schaerbeek Propreté. “It’s a little thing but it’s important, because the children then go back to their homes and they talk about it with their parents.”

But prevention on its own would be naive, he admits. A second team of four is responsible for identifying and punishing the actual offenders. Among the host of truly investigative methods, they set up cameras around the neighbourhood that record people in the act of throwing out illegal waste. In one video, a man drags a couch from his apartment on to the pavement and leaves it there in broad daylight before scurrying away. If they can recognise the culprit, the team go to their house, with the evidence in hand, and slap them with fines that start at €120.

In the last seven years since the introduction of the policies, representatives from other municipalities have reached out to Schaerbeek looking for solutions to their own problems. “We have become a role model for others,” Pierre says. As we talk, a civil servant from Etterbeek is just leaving the office next door. “We don’t have the system of fining, so I wanted to learn a thing or two about it,” he tells me in passing.

Pointing to a map of Schaerbeek in his office that shows different coloured lines and patches representing the divisions between the municipal and regional jurisdictions, Pierre says there should be just one unified cleaning department. “We can sit here talking about complexity being the biggest problem but, at the end of the day, the average resident doesn’t care who cleans the streets. They just want them clean.”

The results of his department’s efforts can seem impressive. Even though Schaerbeek collects twice as much illegal waste as Molenbeek, since 2010 it has managed to reduce that number by more than 20%, from over 5,000 tons to just under 4,000. “Our core business is cleaning and before we can punish the residents we have to know that our job is done well. We have to lead by example.”

Back in Barbeton, Sandland is on the same page. “All you have to do is make a place look nice and people will show respect. It’s a variation on the broken window policy in New York. If you fix something, people will begin to respect it. And as soon as you don’t fix a problem, you leave an invitation for more to come.”

He eventually decided to join the garden society that meets in his neighbourhood three to four times a year. “One day we knocked on every door on my street asking if we could take a bit of the pavement in front of the houses and put a plant and a crawler there,” he says. “Every single household said yes. Then the city came in and added some soil and this year we’re looking at the vines growing to two metres tall. Maybe in five years’ time, Rue Fin will have transformed itself from one of the filthiest streets in Molenbeek into a green garden area.”

This article first appeared in The Bulletin Newcomer, spring 2016