Six hundred and fifty cubic metres. That is how much illegally dumped bulky and construction waste the crews of the public utility Komunalna higijena cleared in a single week from public and traffic surfaces across every Skopje municipality. This is waste somebody deliberately left where it is not allowed.

The largest quantity was lifted in the municipality of Čair - 170 cubic metres from illegal dumps. That is more than a quarter of the total, from one municipality.

Over the same period, 2,700 tonnes of municipal waste were collected and transported from households and businesses across the city. That is the routine work, the reason the utility exists and the thing citizens pay for.

The difference between the two figures

The two numbers describe entirely different things and it is worth not mixing them up. Those 2,700 tonnes are the system working: bin, truck, landfill. Those 650 cubic metres are what goes around the system - somebody loaded up broken concrete, old furniture or building rubble and tipped it beside a street, on an empty plot, behind a fence.

Every cubic metre of that second figure is a bill sent to everyone. Clearing illegal dumps is not free - it is labour hours, fuel, machinery and landfill space, paid out of a budget that the person dutifully putting rubbish in a bin also pays into.

The utility also points out that it continuously maintains public hygiene on boulevards and streets through machine washing with tankers late in the evening, and that squares, the pedestrian bridges in the central city area, the pavements of the Goce Delčev and Sloboda bridges and the Old Skopje Bazaar are washed and swept daily, in three shifts.

All of that is visible work. What is not visible in the statement is the other half of the story: how many penalty reports were filed over those 650 cubic metres, and how many of them ended in a fine that was actually collected. Because the clearing repeats every week precisely because clearing is all that happens.