MORE than $2 million a year is spent on cleaning the city streets of the filth of Canberra’s nightlife.

Vomit, blood, urine, litter, syringes and graffiti are just some of the mess city cleaners take care of by the time most Canberrans get to work at 9am.

The ACT Government spends $1,950,000 a year cleaning the CBD at ground level and Canberra CBD Ltd contributes a further $200,000 to clean the building walls of graffiti.

Territory and Municipal Services’ city operations manager Steve Amos said his 20 staff work 365 days a year, from 5am to 6pm to clean the CBD. He said Sunday was their busiest day.

“People get off their bus at 8am and they don’t realise that the city is all neat and tidy and the litter is all cleaned up,” he said.

“And you probably have experienced seeing Mooseheads at 4am, outside there’s pizza boxes and kebabs and it’s an absolute mess out the front of there.

“How the city looks at 4am and how it looks at 6am is totally different.
“Both teams don’t get much credit for what they do and how they get the city looking as good as it does.”

On an average day, the Government street cleaners start work at 5am, when skip trucks begin emptying rubbish bins across Civic.

Between 5am and 6am, street sweepers start the street and pavement cleaning before the cars and buses arrive for the start of a working day.

From 6am to 9am, ground crews start their cleaning operations including blowing, litter pick up, leaf collection, toilet cleaning and steam cleaning street furniture in the areas including Bunda Street, City Walk, city bus interchange and Glebe Park.

Horticultural staff work from 6am to 2.30pm, maintaining lawns, shrub beds, planters and floral displays in Glebe Park, Veteran’s Park, West Row, City Hill and Northbourne Avenue.

And between 9.15am to 6pm, teams are continuously cleaning, maintaining and repairing assets, across the city in areas including Hobart Place, Law Courts, Childers Street, Bus Interchange and City Walk.

CBD Ltd’s contractor Pickwicks concentrates on the Sydney and Melbourne Buildings on Mondays and Fridays, but clean other buildings on a case-by-case basis.

Its responsibility is to clean from the building to the outside of the building’s awnings.

Canberra CBD Ltd CEO Stephen Gregory said cleaning the CBD is an integrated, complex process and it’s not just as simple as cleaning bins and street sweeping.

“It’s everything together that creates a clean city,” he said.

“It’s us, enhancing what the Government is doing. The Government is doing a very good job trying to keep the city as clean as it can.
“Everyone expects a clean city, everyone demands a clean city.

“The city has remarkably gotten cleaner in recent years.

“Canberra CBD Ltd will put their hand up and say we’ve contributed to that; we won’t take all the glory because we know the Government and their cleaners work really hard every day.

“If you walk down City Walk you see the teams of cleaners polishing bins, making sure it’s all tidy. It’s something that everyone expects and demands, but does everyone help by putting their rubbish in the bins? Probably not, I don’t think they realise how much it costs to get the city clean.”

CBD Ltd has recently funded bin enclosures for businesses using Riverside and Hillside Lanes to help “dramatically reduce waste in lanes”.

CBD Ltd is an independent body formed by the ACT Government to complement the City Centre Marketing and Improvement Program.