Frisco, Texas, Now Sweeping for Stormwater Pollution Abatement
Public works officials in Frisco, Texas, are revamping the city's street sweeping program to emphasize the removal of stormwater pollutants. In addition, the city is providing an impervious areas stormwater fee credit to some members of its business community as a reward for the companies meeting requirements for sweeping their parking lots. Read the story.
City of Pensacola Sweeping Program Evaluation An Ongoing Process
Known for its pristine waterways and sunshine, the City of Pensacola's sweeping program is working hard to combine effectiveness and the realities of the Florida climate, propensity of sand and difficulty of vegetation removal. As increasing pressure is brought to bear in terms of mandated pollution removal, Pensacola's Public Works Director, Al Garza, is faced with difficult decisions on how best to operate his entire department. Read the story.
Sweeping Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
Bill Kappel, Public Works Director for Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, was one of APWA's Top Ten Public Works Officials for 2009. Our interview with him covers the current environmental challenges facing the city and the considerations about how to use sweeping to address them. Includes a 17-minute audio interview. Read the story.
Long Beach Sweeping Program Leads Through Innovation
Jim Kuhl, Bureau Manager for Sweeping at the City of Long Beach, California, discusses what his city is doing to be a leader in particulate removal. Read the story.
The Street Sweeping Program of the City of Copenhagen, Denmark
The city of Copenhagen employs nearly 200 workers to clean its 374 kilometers of public roadways (approximately 233 miles), and its 704 km of sidewalks and 291 km of sidewalks. An additonal 352 km of private roads are maintained by their owners or independent contractors. Hako and Schmidt manufacture most of the city's 25 sweepers, all of which are smaller than a typical American parking lot sweeper. Read the story.
Reader's Digest Picks Top 5 Cleanest Cities for 2006.
According to the editors of Reader's Digest, when it comes to cleanliness there are five major U.S. cities that come out on top. Here's where to find the role that sweeping plays. Read the story.
City of Norfolk Sweeping Program Targets Chesapeake Bay Protection
When leaves fall it creates a headache and funding issues for many street sweeping departments. While some cities allow citizens to put all their leaves into the street for pickup, others mandate fines for anyone caught doing so. Some municipalities have even taken the tack of stopping their sweeping program before the leaves hit the ground. .
City officials in Portland, Oregon, have taken an entirely different approach: Residents are given the option of cleaning up their own leaves or, alternatively, putting them out onto the street in front of their houses for pickup on the city's annual 'Leaf Day.'
However, here's the catch: In 2010, budget cuts led Portland officials to require residents to start paying for leaf pickup throughout the many tree-lined neighborhoods in the city. Throughout those neighborhoods in metro Portland, residents have been given the option of paying a $15 or $30 fee to pay for having a street sweeper remove leaves from the street in front of their homes. Read the story.
The Morning After Partying Like It's 1999
20,000 balloons, 30,000 pom-poms and 2,500 pounds of confetti -- these are only a few of the items New York's vaunted street sweepers pick up after one of the city's annual New Year's Eve extravaganzas. Includes 'scorecard' used to rate sweeping productivity and thoroughness. Read the story.
The Street Sweeper's Night Shift: Story of a Sweeper Operator in Berkeley
For eight hours a night, the streets of downtown Berkeley belong to Adrian La Placa. Read the story.
Sweeping in the City of Sydney, Australia
An interview with Michael Shaw, Sydney's manager of cleansing and waste. Read the story.
Street Savvy Sweeping in Los Angeles
Says Dave Reed, Assistant Director of the Bureau of Street Maintenance for the city of Los Angeles, "The performance level of our street cleaning operations is topped by no major city in the United States, period." And he's got the figures to back it up. Read the story.
Sweeping in Caboolture Shire, Australia
Neil Claridge, public works director for Caboolture Shire, has 42 years of experience. Neil talks about what it's like sweeping in his part of Australia. Read the story.
Amsterdam's Sweeping Challenges
Our editor travelled to Amsterdam to see how sweeping is done in that tourist destination amidst the canals. (Opens into a new window.) Read the story.
Atlanta's Farmers Market Could be a Sanitation Expert's Nightmare
The 65-acre market in Forest Park, GA, operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, shutting down only for Christmas. Owned by the state Agriculture Department, it serves as a central, commercial food district for farmers throughout the state. Read the story.
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The Ball Drops: Then Global Street Sweepers Clean NYC Times Square
Every year after the "ball drops" – and the world-famous New Years Eve party ends at NYC Times Square and everyone goes home – Global Street Sweepers line up and clean up the mess.
Read the story.
The Cleanup of Black Rock City: It's All About the "MOOP"
The Black Rock City Department of Public Works showcased in the following story faces a cleanup challenge few city managers can even comprehend. After many weeks of preparation by a mostly all-volunteer staff in one of the most forbidding desert landscapes in America, up springs Black Rock City, Nevada, site of the legendary event called "Burning Man."
The Black Rock City DPW's challenge is to remove all Matter Out Of Place, or "MOOP," so as to restore a large stretch of harsh desert to 'Leave No Trace' standards after 50,000+ people live there for a week.
Read the story.
City of Norfolk Sweeping Program Targets Chesapeake Bay Protection
The City of Norfolk, Virginia, is the urban center of Hampton Roads with a total population of approximately 247,000 residents. The City managers are responsible for sweeping 1,900 curb miles per month via an extensive program that includes daily sweeping to monthly sweeping.
Street sweeping techniques and best practices are have come under greater scrutiny in recent times since the area is under the oversight of the 2012 Chesapeake Bay Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) requirements, as well as the standard USEPA Stormwater Phase I and II guidelines. As a result, Norfolk city managers have been moved toward the leading edge of investigation toward the best management practices when it comes to utilizing sweepers as the first line of defense in minimizing stormwater runoff pollution. Read the story.
Mr. Sun, Chinese Sweeping Entrepreneur
Our interviewee, Mr. Sun, is one of the new breed of Chinese entrepreneurs. Already a builder of police cars, among other interests, he decided to start importing street sweepers and sell them to cities in his area of China. Here's the story of that venture. Read the story.
Street Sweeping in Tokyo, Japan
Representatives of Kyoei, one of Japan's largest and most well known sweeping contractors, discuss the Japanese sweeping industry. Read the story.
Roadway Sweeping and the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transportation in Japan
Masatoshi Sakai is a member of Japan's 'lead agency' when it comes to roadway sweeping. He talks about how porous pavement is changing the face of sweeping in Japan. Read the story.
An American Sweeping Contractor's Perspective on Amsterdam's Sweeping Program
Kelly Barker, owner of Michigan-based MetroSweep, provides a critical review of Amsterdam's sweeping program. (Opens into a new window.) Read the story.
Aggressive Recycling of Municipal Street Sweepings
Portland municipal sweeping corps do their best to be environmental leaders as well as wring out big savings. Read the story.
The Mechanical Street Sweeping Program of the City of Hong Kong
Although the air was, when this interview was conducted, anyway, somewhat thick with pollution, the pavement everywhere was cleaner than in most American cities. Here's your opportunity to read why. Read the story.
The Manual Cleaning of the City of Hong Kong
With 2,300 workers on the job each day, all wearing a distinctive blue outfit with a reflective vest and accompanied by a broom and debris cart, scheduling and management of the manual sweeping effort in Hong Kong is a Herculean effort. Read the story.
Sweeping Through History in Berkeley, CA
From hand brooms and horses to high tech, from mud to macadam to asphalt, the one constant is change. Read the story.
Manly Beach, Australia: Can You Sweep a Beach?
Bound on three sides by salt water, with an enormous wetland lagoon running down the middle of much of the city's length, Manly has recently discovered polluted waterways in its surrounding ocean beaches as well as in the lagoon in the middle. The task ahead is daunting. Read the story.
Sweeping Up After Mardi Gras
Disciplined sweeper teams perform precision drill maneuvers to keep up with the chaos. Read the story.
With a Hopper - Not a Handgun - Larry Lieswald Cleaned Up L.A.'s Streets
In 1965, Larry Lieswald started out running a flusher truck. By the time he ended his career as a sweeper operator in 1999, he was known locally as a modern-day Zorro who rode, instead of a horse, a Mobile broom street sweeper. Read the story.
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The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the city spent more than $70 million cleaning feces and drug paraphernalia from streets and sidewalks in the 2019 fiscal year, but it's nowhere near what is needed to make San Francisco's streets safe for pedestrians.
