Summer is over, but Skopje's streets still smell of rotten watermelon, spoiled meat and sour milk. Not from the bins, but from what they leave behind: the liquid dripping from the trucks of the public utility "Komunalna Higiena" as they collect the rubbish. Residents of Aerodrom want car parks and streets washed right after the trucks pass, and the trucks themselves sent for inspection and servicing so they stop leaking.

The company's reply is worth remembering. The leaking, says "Komunalna Higiena", is the result of organic waste being improperly packed in the bins, so it is urging citizens to put their rubbish in double bags. The streets, it adds, are regularly washed with tanker trucks late in the evening.

So the truck leaks - and the fix is your bag. Nobody disputes that pouring leftover stew into a bin doesn't help. But the vehicles belong to the public company, not to the citizens. Whether and when the fleet was serviced specifically because of the leaks, the company's response doesn't say a word.

Dumps, rats and 99 reports

The stench is only half the picture. In just one week, the company's crews removed 650 cubic metres of bulky and construction waste from illegal dumps across all of Skopje's municipalities - about 170 cubic metres in Čair alone. That is not waste that fell off a truck by itself. Someone brought it and dumped it. City inspectors recently caught a man dumping construction rubble and bulky waste around bins in Kisela Voda, and police fined a 22-year-old for the same thing in Šuto Orizari.

And how often does anyone actually get caught? In the last six months of last year, the City of Skopje's municipal wardens wrote up 99 reports, and fines were collected from 79 people. For a city producing hundreds of cubic metres of fresh rubble every week, those are odds no dumper takes seriously. Meanwhile, after photos of rats near the "Bunjakovec" shopping centre, the Centar municipality announced another emergency pest-control sweep - the second in just one month.

Skopje doesn't stink for just one reason. People dump rubble wherever they please and are rarely caught, while the public company asks citizens for a double bag instead of asking itself for a truck that doesn't leak. All of this is fixable - and none of it has been fixed.