During July the crews of the Skopje public utility Komunalna Higiena collected and transported 15,735 tonnes of mixed municipal waste from households across the city. They also removed 2,360 cubic metres of improperly dumped bulky and construction waste.

The largest volume of waste from public and traffic surfaces - 255 cubic metres - was collected in the Kisela Voda municipality. The eco-patrol issued 11 educational and informational notices to citizens and legal entities caught breaching the Public Cleanliness Act.

Eleven notices in a month, in a city of half a million people. That is a number that writes its own commentary.

What is still lying on the pavements

The statement says organic waste that fell on public and traffic surfaces after the storm that hit Skopje on 21 July was also removed. That sentence is accurate, but incomplete.

Two weeks have passed since the storm. In fifteen minutes around 200 trees came down in the capital, according to official figures. Most of them have been pushed onto the pavements or the green strips beside them. Some have been cut back from their branches. Piles of branches, shrubs and logs have been sitting untouched since 21 July.

No public utility in the city, nor those under municipal authority, has enough machinery to lift and remove that many trees. That is a real fact and it is nobody's personal fault.

But acknowledging that fact ought to lead somewhere. Two weeks after a storm considered the strongest in years, someone in Skopje still walks past the same pile of branches on their way to work.

The calculation nobody made

The 15,735-tonne figure is a number for a normal July. The obvious question is how large it would have been had the storm debris been collected too - and what that says about the system's capacity.

Komunalna Higiena does its part. Parks and Greenery does its part. So do the municipalities. Everyone has their part, and in the end the tree lies on the pavement because somebody's part ended exactly where somebody else's was supposed to begin.

That is what the city sees every day and what the reports do not record. The report says 15,735 tonnes. The street says the branches are still there.