CleanSpot for Portuguese municipalities

The starting point, in numbers

Portugal produced 5.27 million tonnes of urban waste in 2024, 517 kg per inhabitant: exactly the EU-27 average. Landfill fell 5 percentage points against 2023 but still took 54% of the total, with a 37% preparation-for-reuse-and-recycling rate (APA, state of the environment report).

Those numbers describe the system. What they do not describe is what happens on the street between collections: the container that overflows every weekend, the patch of land where rubble appears every three months, the bulky items left on the pavement because nobody booked a collection. That information exists, residents see it daily, and rarely reaches the service in a usable form.

How this differs from a contact channel

Portugal already has official channels, and they are good at what they were built for. A Minha Rua, run by the state technology agency, lets residents report problems in public space, in participating councils. Lisbon runs its own Na Minha Rua Lx.

A contact channel receives requests. What it does not do is exist before the municipality joins, or resolve anything without a municipal crew: a bin bag a neighbour could have removed in ten minutes still waits for a vehicle.

CleanSpot works from both ends. The citizen app is free and public, so reports already exist in your territory whether or not you are a customer. Subscribing gives you access to them with dispatch and tracking, and keeps the volunteer layer that resolves part of the problem at no operational cost.

What the dashboard does

• A single triage inbox for litter, bag drop-offs and public issues (potholes, streetlights, containers, signage) inside your boundary
• Assignment to internal employees or external contractors, with reassignment and per-assignment status
• A kanban board for daily operations and a map for territorial patterns: which streets recur, where dumping clusters
• Analytics on volumes, resolution times and recurrence, computed in your own timezone
• Configurable email reports: recipients, content types, severity floor, subdivision and cadence, from five-minute alerts to monthly summaries
• Capability-based roles rather than three fixed job titles: build the ones your organisation actually has
• Closure visible to the resident who reported it: instead of silence

Recurrence: what actually changes decisions

A one-off incident is solved by sending a vehicle. What justifies changing a round, siting a container or installing signage is the series: the same point, dated and photographed, twelve times in six months.

That series is what contact channels typically do not preserve, because each request closes on its own when the vehicle passes. On CleanSpot, reopening a location keeps the history attached to the same point, turning scattered complaints into a planning argument.

Procurement questions, answered early

• GDPR-compliant and EU-hosted
• Reports are public by design; personal data is not, and is never sold
• Residents can export or delete their data from the app
• Citizen app in 30 languages: relevant in coastal and tourist municipalities
• Access scoped to your territory: staff see what is inside the boundary and nothing else
• Annual subscription priced by population band

What we do not do

We are not a waste management system: no route optimisation, weighing, billing or container telemetry. If that is what you need, you need a different category of product, and we would rather say so upfront.

Nor do we replace your municipality's official reporting channel. A CleanSpot report is not a formal submission under the state channels. It is operational information, with photographic evidence and a location, plus the community layer that resolves part of it on its own.

Sources

• APA — Relatório do Estado do Ambiente, resíduos urbanos (dados de 2024) (2026-08-29)
• gov.pt — recolha de resíduos: competência municipal (2026-08-29)
• gov.pt — A Minha Rua (comunicar ocorrências no espaço público) (2026-08-29)