Street care and cleaning

Special Cleansing Services

In addition to the normal sweeping methods, Westminster employs a number of specialist vehicles and systems for solving the City's Street Cleaning problems.

Mechanical Sweeping

The mechanical motorised street cleaning fleet is led by our 21 Madvac pavement cleaners. These are used chiefly on major thoroughfares in Westminster and are included both in the scheduled sweeping programme, and the normal cleansing routine. We also operate a small number of larger street and road sweeping machines, manufactured by Schmidt and Johnston. These vehicles are expected to to work day and night, cleaning an average of 5,000 miles of street each, every year!

Street Washing

Westminster operates both a dedicates street washing service. This service is again both scheduled, and available on call. Westminster has some unique problems which often mean that many streets need regular washing, including the large concentration of pubs, cafes and fast food outlets, as well as the problems associated with a large homeless population.

Our fleet includes the 'Aquazura' machine - the first machine of its type in the world. The aquazura combines two cleaning principles – scrubbing and suction to provide the best method of cleaning and degreasing in urban areas. It is also environmentally friendly as it recycles the waste water it uses to clean surfaces. The brushes adapt to the surface while rotating so that waste material is collected within the machine’s footprint. All the litter and waste water is collected by a squeegee as the machine travels along.

Specials

The Street Cleansing service additionally operates a number of other pieces of equipment, including Gully Clearing vehicles, gritters, 'golf cart' style sweepers' vehicles and caged vehicles for removing the recognisable green bags used by Westminster's sweepers.

We also have the new 'cantonet' machine - a vacuum type cleansing machine capable of removing difficult items of litter between pavement cracks - such as cigarette butts.

Environment Action Line 020 7641 2000