Rome's newly elected mayor plans to get the Italian capital's rubbish problem under control by the end of the year with a 40-million-euro plan announced on Tuesday.
The plan is multipronged, Roberto Gualtieri told a press conference, and involves cleaning streets, removing dumped garbage, maintaining vegetation and cleaning drains.
More than 1,000 employees of the municipal waste disposal company Ama Roma are to be deployed to regularly clean up several roads and paths in the city, said Gualtieri, a Social Democrat.
However, the 55-year-old admitted that only 57 percent of Rome's street-sweeping vehicles and bin lorries are currently fit for use.
The city has been plagued by a refuse problem for years now. Gualtieri's predecessor, Virginia Raggi of the populist First Star Movement, was unable to solve the issue, which earned her campaign plenty of criticism in the run-up to the October election.
Gualtieri won the election after promising effective action on the rubbish problem, which is frequently traced to issues at the landfills.
