In the neighborhood the comment is the same: "It's about time." Frequented by hundreds of people, including tourists, the Sant'Elia seafront was disfigured by waste. It took only two mornings, yesterday and today, to remove a large part of it. The stretch that goes from the Ponte Nervi to the canal was cleaned up thanks to the work of about twenty people hired by the Municipality of Cagliari as part of the regional Lavoras project.
Yesterday they removed most of the bulky items, including those inside the vandalized kiosks, while today they collected the smaller ones. The area adjacent to the park of the rings, not far from the buildings, still needs to be cleaned: here there are even the remains of boats and various household appliances, but the Municipality is trying to understand how to intervene, since this specific area is owned by the regional state property. In the meantime, however, the bulk of the waste has been removed.
The intervention yesterday and today is in addition to the one called “Urban cleaning” carried out on Sunday on the beach of the dam, wanted by the Municipality in collaboration with the association of volunteers "Rebel Terra" and, even before, in December, the extraordinary pre-Christmas cleaning intervention carried out by the operators of the municipal soil hygiene service.
"The workers hired by us as part of Lavoras in this case perform an urban hygiene service that is supplementary to that of the contracted company", says the Environment Councilor Luisa Giua Marassi, "this project aims to reintegrate unemployed people into the workplace. They are very motivated, they do it as if it were a mission, some are actually from Sant'Elia and want to keep their neighborhood clean. People thank them, they are happy. This intervention can be an incentive to stimulate the civic sense of the people who live there. Sant'Elia is very large, so they also have to divide it into other areas, including the one with the apartment blocks, there is a lot to collect there. Unfortunately, there is a continuous abandonment of waste especially after the Cuore market, so everything will be done to clean constantly". At the same time as the Lavoras workers are working there is a team of six people, some of whom are from Sant'Elia, who are doing an internship as part of "Custodi del Bello", an international project promoted by the Italian Episcopal Conference and Caritas Italiana, active in 12 Italian cities, aimed at vulnerable people, both Italian and foreign, who, thanks to the care of public areas such as parks, gardens, streets and squares, are reintegrated into the community and the world of work. They are currently taking care of the flowerbeds of Sant'Elia and collecting any waste they may find inside them.
