Last week’s hundreds of thousands of beach visitors in Zandvoort left behind mountains of waste. Waste processors Spaarnelanden and Gebroeders Paap have their hands full with it, but are not afraid of anything. “I think: bring it on!”, says Peter Latour of Spaarnelanden. “We’ll take care of it.”
The visitors to the coastal village leave everything behind after a sunny day, ranging from pizza boxes, bottles to empty cans. A lot goes neatly into the hundreds of waste bins that are everywhere on the beach and boulevard, but a lot also ends up on the ground or in the sand. Last weekend about seven times as much waste was left behind compared to an average weekend in October.
The cleaning up of the waste is partly done by Spaarnelanden and partly by the Paap brothers. Spaarnelanden is responsible for the waste on the boulevard and in the village. De Gebroeders Paap is about the beach. Beach pavilion owners are responsible for keeping their terrace and beach clean within a radius of ten meters around their business.
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On the hot summer days, people work very hard to clean up all the waste. – NH News
Peter Latour is team leader waste and cleaning at Spaarnelanden and sends teams with sweeping and garbage trucks to the boulevard and the village every day. In addition, teams are also going out to clean up litter.
“It is a lot of work. We go out early in the morning at about six o’clock and in the evening around eight o’clock we do the same round again.” They collect about six to seven thousand kilos of waste in two days, which is about seven times as much as normal.
“We work until the next morning without a break, that’s really tough”
“In the morning we are working for four hours and in the evening something like that. And on a gray day in November you are ready in two and a half hours.” So it is much more work than usual, but no extra people are deployed. These so-called peak days are part of the job. “Everything is cleared up around eleven o’clock in the morning and it is spick and span again in Zandvoort. And precisely at peak times we should not let our heads hang, but go for it.”
Brothers Paap
De Gebroeders Paap is a real Zandvoort family business and has been responsible for the waste on the beach for more than 50 years. The cleanup is done at night. “If we have a lot of work to do, we go out in the evening at eleven or twelve o’clock. And then we work until ten o’clock the next morning without a break, which is really tough, says Leen Paap.
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They go down the high tide line from Bloemendaal to Zandvoort with a cleaning machine. And with a special shovel, actually a kind of inverted garbage truck, they empty the hundreds of waste bins on the beaches of Bloemendaal and Zandvoort.
“We do notice that more waste is left behind on days like this,” says Paap. “That people put their waste next to waste bins is a real disaster. That happens when a bin is full, but usually the bin four meters away is not full at all. People just don’t want to walk with their waste. And I don’t mean everyone, of course. , but a few. But when seagulls run off with the waste, it really becomes a mess.”
Every night ten men from the Paap Brothers are on the road. “In terms of waste, these are really peak days.” The company also transports the beach houses and the beach pavilions, so they still have a number of peak moments in the spring and autumn.
formula 1
Peter Latour does not have much time to recover from the busy days, because the Formula 1 weekend is in Zandvoort in three weeks and the scripts are already ready for that. “Last year was a kind of dress rehearsal because there were fewer visitors because of corona, so we are curious about how it will go this year.” Even then, they work day and night to clear up the waste and keep Zandvoort tidy.