The City Council is very aware of environmental sustainability and demonstrates it with facts. The last bet is to take advantage of the palm leaves that the strong winds felled in the last storm to make compost and fertilize the public gardens.
Until this goal is achieved, this species and the vine shoot leaves are crushed with a specific machine for this purpose that the City Council rents and once crushed they are transferred to the municipal estate of Santa Eulalia, which will become a large space green, to be used as a “layer” or “mattress” on the ground in the parks, specifically in El Pinar, to prevent the growth of weeds.
“The vine shoot is a problem because the Consistory was spending 10,000 euros to rent trays during pruning, a high amount for a small municipality that had no greater profitability than transporting and leaving the collection points empty”, comments the mayor , Juan Antonio Abreu.
To give continuity to this initiative and expand its objectives, the Consistory has presented a subsidy to obtain a bioshredder machine with which it can work throughout the year.
“This idea arose after a meeting with those responsible for the Ministry of Ecological Transition, Fight against Climate Change and Territorial Planning, in which it was commented that 80% of the compost that reaches the Canary Islands comes from Holland. As a result of this reality, we proposed that we could give viability to our initial idea”, specifies the president.
As a consequence, the City Council has presented a subsidy to the Government of the Canary Islands through European funds to try to obtain this tool and at the same time, it has proposed an employment project to the Cabildo de Tenerife focused on the creation of community composters. “The union of this compost bin and the compost that we are going to produce, is going to give us a compost that we will use in municipal gardens with the consequent savings that this entails,” he declares.
This last project begins in March and will last nine months, during which time the beneficiaries will be trained and the containers where organic matter can be decomposed will be created.
