BRUSSELS – On Tuesday, 25 November 2025, King Philippe of Belgium visited the Schaerbeek municipality to spotlight the capital’s worsening waste crisis. Walking through streets lined with uncollected household bags, abandoned furniture and illegal dumps, the king called for a coordinated regional response to a problem that has become one of the most visible daily frustrations for Brussels residents.
The royal visit took place on a day disrupted by strikes at Bruxelles-Propreté, the public agency in charge of waste collection. Industrial action over pay and working conditions left many neighbourhoods without regular pick-ups, turning routine delays into overflowing sidewalks. In Schaerbeek and neighbouring communes such as Sint-Joost-ten-Node, residents regularly encounter entire households’ worth of discarded items dumped overnight.
During the visit, King Philippe joined local cleanliness officials for a short walk and then took part in a roundtable discussion with citizens, waste-collection workers, municipal staff and activists from the citizen collective Bruxelles (Pou)belle.
Jonathan De Jonck, co-founder of Bruxelles (Pou)belle, told Flemish news outlet Bruzz that the king had been unequivocal about his concern. “He is not only the head of state; he also lives in Brussels and, like everyone else, is confronted with rubbish on the streets. He considers cleanliness a basic requirement for a respectful society, and we can only applaud that,” De Jonck said. He stressed that the monarch’s message was not aimed solely at Schaerbeek but at the entire Brussels-Capital Region: “We need to tackle this together and structurally.”
The scale of the problem is undeniable. In the first six months of 2025 alone, the Fix My Street reporting platform registered nearly 14,000 cleanliness-related complaints – a slight increase on the same period in 2024. Illegal dumping accounted for the vast majority, followed by incorrectly placed waste bags and overflowing public bins. Year after year the totals have risen: 18,175 complaints in 2022, 23,176 in 2023 and 29,717 in 2024.
Recent surveys consistently rank public cleanliness among the top three concerns for both Belgian residents and the city’s large international community. A 2025 poll conducted by The Bulletin and Vote Brussels found that expats in particular see littered streets as a major drag on quality of life.
Brussels’ waste woes stem from a combination of factors: a fragmented governance structure split across 19 municipalities and a regional authority, uneven enforcement of sorting rules, recurring strikes, insufficient recypark capacity and a sharp rise in fly-tipping of construction debris and commercial waste. New European requirements for separate organic-waste collection, rolled out gradually since 2024, have added complexity, with many residents still confused about the colour-coded bag system.
Municipalities have begun to fight back. Several threatened fines against Bruxelles-Propreté itself for missed collections under the revised 2025 schedule, while others installed surveillance cameras at notorious dumping spots. A regional campaign launched in October 2025 targets commercial areas with inspections and awareness drives running into 2026. Administrative fines for small littering offences – cigarette butts, cans and overflowing bins – have also been streamlined and are being issued more frequently.
Citizen initiatives are gaining traction too. Bruxelles (Pou)belle’s petition for a dedicated parliamentary commission on cleanliness gathered the required signatures within weeks and led to the creation of a special committee in autumn 2025. Voluntary clean-up events, a “Clean Festival” organised in September and expanded bulky-waste collection drives have removed hundreds of tonnes of material from the streets in recent months.
Despite these efforts, progress remains slow in the densest and most disadvantaged neighbourhoods. The regional clean.brussels strategy, launched in 2022 with ambitious targets through 2025, has delivered new litter bins and annual clean-up days but has yet to reverse the overall trend.
King Philippe’s intervention, though largely symbolic in constitutional terms, has amplified calls for urgency at a time when EU recycling and zero-landfill targets loom ever closer. With winter approaching and the risk of further strikes into 2026, residents fear rotting waste and proliferating rats will only worsen conditions.
As Jonathan De Jonck summarised after the royal visit, “cleanliness is a basic requirement for a respectful society.” For Brussels to reclaim its streets, words – even from the palace – will need to be matched by swift, coordinated action across every level of government.
