THE ROAD TO RECYCLING

Despite decades of information campaigns and ever-increasing media coverage of the climate crisis it’s still possible to overhear, with alarming frequency, people who declare that: “it doesn’t matter which bin you use, because it all ends up in the same place anyway”. Jessica Knipe goes on a deep dive through our rubbish to find out what recycling really means on a daily basis.

Greta Thunberg made an unusual media splash when her comments on Twitter about pizza box recycling ended up being credited with helping to locate a suspected felon. But here in NouvelleAquitaine, there are teams who have been encouraging people to put things in the right bins for decades.

In Charente-Maritime, for example, a public service syndicate called Cyclad has been working to reduce, collect, recycle and treat waste from nearly a quarter of a million residents of over 200 towns and villages for the last 30 years. For Gaëlle Merle, who has been in charge of its communication for 20 of those years, the daily challenge is to make people aware of how their actions have a direct impact on the country’s ecology, not to mention its economy. “In France, we operate on a ‘sorted at the source’ system,” explains Gaëlle. “This means that from the moment you choose to put something in the ‘black bin’, then it hasn’t been sorted, and it won’t be recycled. If you put a piece of cardboard in that bin, then it will get burnt or buried like the rest. It won’t get sorted later on.”

The ‘yellow bins’, for rubbish that can be recycled, have existed in the area for over 20 years too, and whereas the sorting system at home used to be confusing, it has recently been streamlined and simplified to make it easy for absolutely anyone to apply. “The rules are now very simple,” says Gaëlle. “Anything that’s packaging goes in to be recycled.” Empty oil bottles? Yellow bin. Yoghurt pots and their lids? Yellow bin. But do they have to be rinsed? “No! Using water to send packaging to get recycled would defeat the purpose in terms of the carbon footprint!” says Gaëlle. Obviously, you shouldn’t put a half full carton of soup in there, but no need to have spotless packets, either.

The unsorted waste is incinerated, until the treatment centres’ capacity is met after which deliveries go off to a landfill. Without even going into the damage this creates to the environment, it also represents a huge financial cost to the region. And even if burning waste could potentially become a source of energy through heating networks, landfill sites only have downsides.

“It’s a very complex subject,” explains Nouvelle-Aquitaine’s regional advisor in charge of waste, Jérôme Guillem. “We can plan and manage as much as we want, but our main goal is to avoid having waste in the first place. We must first reduce waste, then recycle as much as possible, and finally, find the least worst solution for what we call ‘ultimate waste’.”

In an effort to reduce plastic waste, the region recently announced its policy aiming for zero plastics by 2030. “The effort is towards zero plastic pollution, not zero plastic,” qualifies Jérôme. “We have to be honest, and realistic: there are plenty of sectors, like hospitals, which simply can’t reduce their plastic consumption to zero. We can make the most of some very innovative techniques to repurpose it, though! Plastic waste can become a polar fleece, a train carpet or even a car hood. We just don’t want to burn or bury it.”

Thankfully, the vast majority of the waste handled by Cyclad (59%) comes from the ‘déchetteries’, or local tips, but anything else is managed by recycling units, which sort again through the waste already theoretically sorted at home. These plants are open to visits

Read the full article in our April issue...