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History of waste management in Cracow begins in 1906. That year Cracow Municipal Authorities decided to take control over all issues related to City cleaning and collecting garbage. That's why Municipal Cleaning Plant was established. In 1907 the first horse-car for waste collecting appeared on Cracow streets, and soon after that the first specialized motor-car service was established.
After 1945 the company belonged to the State, and since 1951 has been named "Municipal Service and Waste Management Company". In 23 November 1993 it was transformed into Private Limited Company. The sole owner of the company is Commune City of Cracow, which owns 100% of the shares.
In XIX century it was the city's duty to clean and sweep public squares and roads, dispose of street rubbish, mud, snow, ash and other household refuse. In order to carry out these duties, the council created the Municipal Cleaning Plant, subordinate to the chief of the fire brigade. The cost of cleaning and disposal was carried by increase in land tax by 1.5%.
Juliusz Leo, The Mayor of Kraków announced in a special decree of 31 December that from 1 January the municipality would dispose of ash and household rubbish from all properties that paid land tax on private land properties, and that the Municipal Cleaning Plant would take care of these tasks mornings and evenings. The Mayor requested the residents to support and facilitate this "difficult and costly task" in any way they could.
UNDER THE MAGISTRATE'S MANAGEMENT
1907 - 1950
Feliks Nowotny, the chief of the Kraków Fire Brigade became the first director of the Municipal Cleaning Plant, which employed 253 people at the time. The company had premises in the Fire Brigade headquarters Kraków was subsequently divided into manageable cleaning regions, maintained by the company.
The streets were still swept either manually or by the use of horsedrawn carts with fitted brushes. Other refuse, mainly ash from household coal ovens and other "sweepings", was disposed of by the so-called koprohor vehicles, imported from Vienna. The latrine waste was removed by Tallard steam machines and purpose designed sewage wagons.
Since 1907 the Municipal Cleaning Plant had been equipped with horse-drawn carts called "dragons", commissioned by the magistrate and made by Kraków welders the Kossobudzki brothers. The carts were roofed and fit for transporting 30 tin boxes wih a capacity of 100 litres. The disposal system thus created was called a "box system". Gradually the waste ditches near properties were eliminated and replaced with a containers/boxes.
In 1914 - 1918, during World War I, the company suffered with the rest of the city. Most of its equipment fell into disrepair or was seized by the army. A lot of the company employees joined the army. Still the cleaning tasks were on the increase. It became urgent to clean the army posting areas and clear the streets after the passage of armies through the city. The problem was serious, posing an immediate epidemiological threat to the city residents.
At the end of the war Poland finally regained independence. After 123 years of foreign rule, Poles had their country back, and the need to focus on municipal economics in large cities was urgent as ever. On 16 March 1928 the president issued an Act on Waste and Raiwater Disposal, imposing new duties on the municipality. According to the new law, all municipalities with more than 10 000 residents had to "take every care to have at their disposal a sufficient nymber of public and private utilities to the collection of rubbish and industrial waste, and removing rubbish and scraps from individual properties". It was the duty of large municipalities so designate areas for waste deposits and define theirwaste removal procedures.
To meet the demands of the new era, in 1925 the city bought 4 trucks for mud clearance, and 2 sweepers/sprinkers from the renowed French factor De Dion-Bouton. Once they had been tested for 6 months, the city made additional purchase of 8 roofed, self-unloading trucks for the disposal of dty mud, 4 self-unloading open roof trucks for fluid mud clearance, 6 sweepers/sprinklers and 2 street sprinlers. Afer another year of trial, in 1926 the city bought 15 specialist cars for ash and household waste removal and two years taler, 2 sweepers/sprinklers for washing smooth road surfaces. By the 20s, the company owned 43 specialist cars, which entirely met the cleaning needs of the city. Horse drawn carts were still used for latrine waste clearance, but with the expansion of the sewerage system their number was gradually reduced. In the 1920s a "single container" system for the disposal of ash and refuse was introduced in Kraków. Household waste was collected in tin containers, emptied regularly by the cleaning company.
In the 1930s, solid waste was deposited in two municipal landfills. Still, rubbish was also thrown into random ditches or was layered under road surfaces or used for leveling of construction areas. It was a municipal duty to clear latrines at properties which were not connected to the sewerage system. Horse-drawn carts and Tallard machines were used for this purpose.
In 1938 - 1939 the solid waste disposal system covered approximately 4600 city properties i.e. 55% of all residents, and 250 other properties were part of the network for liquid waste clearance. Approximately 32 000 tin, enameled, closed containers, with a 110 litre capacity, were installed in the city, meeting its full demand.
In September 1939, at the beginning of World War II, the Municipal Cleaning Plant employed approximately 300 workers, but the following years brought an overall disaster. 12 of the waste disposal vehicles were evacuated to Lvov. Horse-drawd carts, withdrawn 10 years earlier, were reinstalled, for the lack of workforce and equipment.
In 1945, when the Soviet army took over the city, the company immediately started ro rebuild its offices and garages at the headquarters in 12 Barska Sreet. The company buildings, neglected by the Nazis, were additionally damaged by the explosion of the bridge on the Vistula, blown-up by the withdrawing Nazi army, which also took with it most of the company vehicles and equipment.
Immediately after World War II, solid waste disposal was carried out by horse-drawn carts, as though all the years of progress and modernization had never happened. The company garage worked on mobilizing the vehicles passed on by the municipality but progress was slow and the shortage of tools, materials, fuel and people was badly felt. Still, by the end of 1945, the company had 28 vehicles, though 9 specialist machines, mainly sprinklers and sewage tanks. The vehicles were mostly military, such as Dodge, Mercedes, Opel and GMG, without any specialist capacity for waste removal, and out of 32 000 waste containers allocated to the residents in 1938, only 6000 were still in place after the war.
The situation improved in 1949 - 50. In 1950 the company owned 60 vehicles, 18 of them specialized. The surface area of streets and squares approved for municipal cleaning increased by half, in relation to 1945, and so did the number of properties for solid and liquid waste disposal; however, the number of containers was further reduced from 6000 in 1945 to a mere 5000 in 1950. This number needed to be increased by fivefold as Kraków's population had grown to 300 000.
The deficit of containers created a lot of "loose waste" kept in people's houses, which used to be collected by the plant's employees, who used shovels to fill in the containers they brought, and then empty them manually into their trucks, covered with large cloths to prevent the ash and waste from spilling in transportation. World War II, like its predecessor, threw technology back by dozens of years.
State-owned Enterprise
1951 - 1993
After the war, the legal status of municipal companies changed again. They were managed by the local, subordinate organs of central administration, and became a part of central distribution and planning. In oher words, all municipal companies became state-owned public service enterprises within the municipal economics sector, subordinate to the Ministry of Municipal Economics in Warsaw.
In the same way the Municipal Cleaning Plant, founded before World War II, became on 2 february 1951 a state-owned Municipal Cleaning Company (MPO) in Kraków, ultimately supervised by the minister of "cleaning and sprinkling the city areas together with refuse, snow, mud, ice, municipal and industrial waste and sewage disposal" and "providing the city properties with waste and ash containers".
In the 1950s, MPO disposed 400 000m3 solid waste and 29 000m3 of sewage a year. At the same time MPO, now with 540 employees, began the production of compost, sold to allotment owners and municipal greenery maintenance companies. Kraków's population had also grown to 450 000 residents. In the mid- 1950s MPO owned 71 vehicles, including trucks for the removal of solid waste and 5 sewage tanks, 3 street sprinklers and 3 three-wheeled sweepers. Most of the other vehicles were old and requiring constant repair, and there was still a shortage of waste containers. In 1954 the 6000 containers in use did not, by far, meet the demand in the city.
In 1957 the enterprise bought 45 new Polish-made "Star" vehicles, including 5 street sprinklers and 4 sewage tanks and a fleet of open-load trucks, and 1300 new containers. The number of employees rose sharply to 770. The increase of equipment and employment certainly contributed to better technology and working practices, but the tines were still hard. The Polish-made vehicles were badly designed, badly made and inconvenient in use.
The first specialized vehicles for solid waste disposal were presented to MPO in 1959. This time they were Czech-made vehicles with a closed load facility, which replaced the old De Dion-Bouton lorries, bought before the war and used for over 30 years. In 1960, MPO held 107 vehicles, including 24 for refuse collection, 9 sewage tanks, 31 sprinkler/washer machines, 42 trucks and 1 car.
The 160s statistics reflect a considerable growth of services rendered by MPO. In 1961 the company disposed of 462 000m3 of solid waste, collected from 367 000 residents i.e. 84% of all city residents. In 1964, 557 000m3 of waste was collected from 422 000 i.e. 11 800 properties. The number of waste baskets in the streets grew from 18 800 to 34 500, which certainly improved the overall situation. The waste was disposed of to natural or arranged basins in the city and outside.
The fact that the fleet of vehicles was expanded in 1960s meant that the old garages at the headquarters in 12 Barska Street, built in 1922-23 for 30-40 vehicles, were much too small. The new cars were parked at the area in front of the offices or in the streets. Consequently, a decision was made to build a new facility for MPO, which was taken over for use in 1969. The new premises were built over an area of 4,8 ha, with the buildings occupying 13 500 m2.
At the end of the 1960s, Kraków had 550 000 residents producing more waste and requiring new areas for its deposit. In 1970 MPO signed an agreement with Wieliczka Salt Mine to create a dumping site in the exploited and closed mining areas in Barycz. When MPO took over the site, it was divided into 3 stages, each occupying approximately 1/3 of the area. The stages were to be used in turn, as numbered. In December 1974, Stage I of the dumping site was officially opened for use.
At the beginnings of the 1970s, MPO was presented with Polish-made vehicles called jelcz 1100, made for the transportation of 1100 litre containers, which compensated for a shortage of workforce on the market. The first Container truck Left for the streets of Kraków in 1974. At the same time the company's fleet of vehicles was expanded with smaller cars, used for collecting street sweepings, refuse from waste baskets and other waste picked up from the backyards with small entrance gates.
The situation improved in the mid-1970s when MPO was an employer of over 1000 people. It became a principal task to maintain this level of employment. Almost a quarter of the workforce left their jobs with MPO every year, due to hard working condition and low wages, in fact the lowest wage on the job market.
In 1980, after the Gdansk Shipyard events, joined MPO workers organized the Independent Trade Union "Solidarity" within the company. Nearly 70% of all employees entered the union and the new organization began fighting for better working conditions and pay. In spite of the fact that all management positions in the company were still occupied by communist party members, the newly organized workers began to discuss their social and economic situation and put forward claims. They didn't hace to wait long, at least for better wages.
In 1980-81 with 1100 employers, Kraków MPO had the highest level of employment in its whole history. The company organized 2 buses to transport in workers from the outside of the city and maintained a workforce of just over 1000 workers for some time. Once Martial Law was announced ao 13 December 1981, the immediate supervision of the company was taken over by the army commissar and 8 officers. At the time, the company had almost 300 vehicles at its disposal, but many of them were old and ruined. However, with the city's continued growth and the population growing to 700 000, the demand for the company's services was on the increase.
The act of parliament on local government, issued on 8 March 1990, sanctioned the creation throughout Poland of territorial governments with considerable autonomy, their own legal framework and estate. Based on this act, The Kraków Municipality received all legal rights to state -owned municipal companies, amongs them MPO, which was now under the immediate supervision of Kraków Municipal Council.
The Municipal Council took a decision with regards to the company's privatization and transformation into a limited company, with shares sold to private entieies. The Council treated the privatization as a model sale of the entire municipal company.
In this transformed social and political climate the residents of the Barycz landfill area, owned until 1991 by MPO, protested against the landfill's harmful impact. They filed complaints on the odours arising from biograding organic waste, water and air pollution, bacteriological hazards, noise produced by birds feeding at the landfill, and clouds of fire-hazardous methane hanging above the landfill. In 1992, Barycz residents protested at the City Hall demanding immediate handling of the issues and, a week later, they blocked off the access of vehicles to the waste deposit area. The protest ended with promised to modernize the landfill. As a result, Stage I of the landfill was covered by layers of clay and soil, sown with grass and altogether reclaimed by the end of 1992. The new degassing chambers were built to burn off biogas, and the whole area was surrounded by a belt of greenery, for the elimination of unpleasant odours and the reduction of noise.
On 12 June 1992, the Municipal Council adopted a resolution on the transformation of the Municipal Cleaning Company, Kraków into a commercial company. On 20 August 1993 the Council decided to transform the company into a sole proprietorship limited company, owned by the Municipality of Kraków, and on 28 October 1993 a foundation act was signed, creating the Municipal Cleaning Company Ltd. With a 100% share of Kraków Municipality.
Municipal Company
Since 1993
On 23 November 1993 MPO Ltd. was registered and a two-member management board was granted an exclusive right to manage the company and represent it on the market. The management board was called into being by the shareholders' meeting, which was entirely made of Kraków Municipality Councils, as the only owner of the company's foundation capital. The management board became directly subordinate to the 6-member supervisory council. Henryk Kultys was then chosen, in a competitive procedure, to become the President of the Management Board and Tadeusz Król became the Vice-President of the Management Board.
According to the signed agreement, the company's operations focused on: sewage and refuse disposal, sanitary and related services, and other manufacturing, commercial, services and investment activities, including import and export in the public utility sector. The company's principal tasks were defined in the agreement as: providing services in solid and liquid waste disposal, furnishing the serviced properties with portable waste containers, summer and winter maintenance in the city, management of the municipal landfill Barycz and, finally, the segregation of municipal waste - a sign of approaching progress.
In 1994, MPO employed only 473 workers, half of the employment figure of 1989, which together with average salaries paid and number of vehicles owned by the company, reflects the fact that MPO's share in the waste management market was quite insignificant. In 1995, the company disposed of 885 000 m3 of solid and 57 000 m3 of liquid waste, and cleared 202 km of streets of snow, which meant that the equivalent figures in relation to the 1980s fell almost by half, and even more in case of liquid waste. In 1995, the company owned 143 specialist vehicles, which is a half of what they owned in 1989/90, and most of the vehicles were old and in need of constant repair.
In this difficult situation MPO Ltd. adopted a new policy of searching for new clients, focusing on quality of services and expansion of their range. The company invested in specialist equipment for waste disposal and street cleaning to provide better quality, lower cost and higher efficiency, gradually becoming a competitive player on the waste utilization market. The technical and organizational resources created in the process, allowed the company to offer its services beyond Kraków market.
In 1992-93, the first recycling containers for paper, glass, plastics, metal and cloth were distributed around Kraków. MPO developed a "Segregation Programme for the City of Kraków", which involved an educational campaign on waste segregation and utilization. By 1995, the company collected 355 tons of recyclables, with a 6% recovery index. In spite of occasional acts of vandalism, such as the burning of containers, the campaign was generally well received in the city.
In 1995, based on a separate agreement, the Municipality commissioned the management of the "Barycz" landfill to MPO Ltd., which began a phase of implementation of a long-term modernization plan for the area, co-financed by the municipal budget, the National Fund of Environment Protection and Water Management, European funds and MPO's own budget. Stage I of the landfill was reclaimed in 1995 and depositing methods were considerably improved, reducing the landfill-related hazards to the residents of the area and to the natural environment.
The company's continued growth and increased sales of services contributed to higher employment and significantly higher investment, mainly into specialist equipment and modernization of vehicles. The company's financial results improved a great deal: in 1998 the income related to solid waste disposal grew by 67% and the profits of the whole company grew by 10% (from 4.72% to 14.91%). MPO Ltd. gained 6000 new clients and their number was now 29 000. Five years into the transformation process , MPO had at its disposal 156 vehicles valued at 4 million Euro. In 1998, the company completed work on degassing installations in the reclaimed part of the landfill. In 2001, the last of the three power blocks serviced by landfill biogas was taken over for use, and the preparation work for the development of Stage III was well underway.
On 10 June 1998 the Municipal Council issued a resolution on the establishment of a "Municipal Waste Management Programme for Kraków Municipality" and all of the company's activities focused on the realization of the programme's main tasks. The programme envisaged that the Barycz landfill will be used for depositing waste until 2028. The 30 year plan anticipated that Kraków's Waste Management policies will concentrate on the reduction of waste directed to the landfill, through increased segregation, recycling, composting and thermal utilization (incineration).
In 1999 MPO Ltd. applied for the co-financing of the expansion of the municipal landfill site at "Barycz" from the funds available within the pre-accession ISPA programme (Instrument for Structural Policies for Pre-Accession). The modernization project thus created under the name of "Kraków waste management - Stage I" anticipated the expansion of the landfill, construction of container composting plant with an annual capacity of 6000 tons and a segregation plant with a capacity of 20 000 tones a year. The Financial Memorandum was signed in December 2000, according to which the Municipality, together with the Poviat and Municipal Fund for Environment Protection and Water Management and MPO Ltd., was to cover 38% of the overall costs and the remaining 68% was to be funded by ISPA.
One of the EU financing conditions stipulated that MPO Ltd. was to initiate an educational campaign, In 2000, the company adopted its "mascot" - a dragon called Basil - in support of its segregation and recycling activities in the city, following which it also issued a record with songs for children and a computer game with an ecological theme. Since then, the company has participated and sponsored an annual :"Ecological Wxhibition", organized each spring by the Kraków Municipality. The Barycz landfill was opened to visitors, the company became a regular participant in the annual campaign "Cleaning the World" and organized a free collection of non-standard waste. Large skips for the collection of these items were placed around the city according to a schedule published in advance.
In 2000, with an increasing presence of foreign companies on Kraków's waste management market, MPO Ltd. had to make its costs and efficiency more competitive. More equipment had to be purchased to meet the demands of the new situation. The quality and efficiency of services had to be improved. The company's headquarters in Nowohucka Street had to be modernized and computerized. All these activities resulted in a further increase in the number of clients. In 2002, the company serviced 34 600 residents, expanding its service area outside of Kraków.
Thanks to the new service on offer - a free collection of large and non - standard refuse - the whole process of abandoning hese objects in various unauthorized locations was eliminated. These items could be now delivered to special 8m3 containers left in designated areas, in accordance with a schedule published prior to the event. In 2004, MPO initiated a campaign of collecting large items, such as furniture, household electronics and other large objects directly from the pavement outside properties. The objects, put out for collection between 6-8 p.m. on special dates, were removed by MPO within the next two hours. In 2006, all city districts joined the campaign.
In order to confirm the high Quality of services offered by MPO Ltd., in 2004 the company began the certifying process for Quality Assurance Certificate, compliant with the PN-EN ISO 9001:2001 standard. The company's employees were internally trained in the new procedures and the Quality Certificate Nr 1403/1/2004, issued by the Warsaw-based Polish Research and Certification Centre S.A., was handed over to the President of the Management Board at the opening celebration of Stage III of the landfill, in January 2005.
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