The Joan Miró cleaning centre is a semi-buried building for the city's cleaning equipment. Underground, next to the Joan Miró sculpture in Parc de l'Escorxador, this waste collection centre has been inaugurated, with capacity for 300 workers and 60 electric vehicles that go out every day to clean the city.
A discreet building, buried in Joan Miró park
The building, which was inaugurated in May 2018, occupies a quarter of the park, the size of four blocks of l'Eixample. It is one of the most modern and efficient spaces in the city, but which goes unnoticed at street level. As it is buried, it is not visible to pedestrians. This allows all activity to be carried out minimizing noise, visual impact, and disturbances to neighbours, in a building located at a strategic and central point, ensuring that vehicles take less time to move around the neighbourhood.
The building has obtained the 4-leaf VERDE certification, awarded by the Green Building Council.
The reuse of an underground space allows this building to be located in such a strategic and central point, ensuring that vehicles take less time to move around the neighbourhood.
It has a capacity for 300 people and is a highly energy efficient facility, where almost all the cleaning water is recycled, and the vehicles are all state-of-the-art electric.
The semi-underground building is developed on two floors, the Basement Floor and a semi-underground floor. Its main use is as a Cleaning Centre and its secondary uses are: Green Spaces, Local Association of Neighbours of l'Escorxador Park and Pumping Station of the park's ornamental fountain.
An area of the basement floor is designated for parking space, vehicle cleaning with reclaimed water, and electric vehicle charging. The other area integrates different sections that are part of the daily street cleaning process and the cleaning and maintenance of the vehicle fleet.
The semi-basement floor, in addition to its main use, also has office spaces, meeting rooms, facilities, and changing rooms of the Cleaning Centre, with areas allocated to the other mentioned secondary uses.
Manage, without bother or noise, the waste of two neighbourhoods
In the building is the point of departure and arrival for the cleaning vehicles of the Left Eixample and Sant Antoni that mainly collect waste on the roadway (leaves, papers, bottles...). Some waste that is currently transported to a treatment plant where it is sorted and recycled. Every day, more than 5,000 kilos of waste.
A green and sustainable cleaning park
The building is an example of energy efficiency that takes advantage of all resources. The vehicles are cleaned with groundwater, which is also used to clean the streets. Almost 100% of the water used by workers for showering and washing (greywater) is also reused. The DHW for the employees' showers and the entire climate system is produced with geothermal energy. All vehicles are electric and will soon be recharged with the energy provided by the future photovoltaic pergola that will cover the building.
In this centre, 60 electric cleaning vehicles work, cleaning the streets without emitting any polluting gases. Additionally, they also use groundwater in urban cleaning tasks.
In addition, the design of the building as a whole stands out for all the additional sustainable design measures implemented: energy efficiency in lighting, improvements in air quality and indoor climate, acoustic comfort measures and measures to reduce air pollution. And finally, it should be noted that its location allows for easy access to the municipal public transportation network and adjacent services, which avoids the use of private vehicles by employees.
The building aspires to achieve the 4 Leaves VERDE certification awarded by the GBCe. Thanks to the certification, many aspects that improve the sustainability of the project have been improved and given visibility and specificity, and it has also been a motivating tool to give a boost to all the above-mentioned sustainable design measures.
