Baptiste Monsaingeon is a sociologist. Lecturer at the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne, he is the author ofHomo detritus. Criticism of the waste society (Threshold, 2017).
From 1er January 2024, the law will require communities to offer solutions for recycling organic waste. In your opinion, is this decision going in the right direction?
Separate collection of organic waste should have been implemented much earlier! For thirty years in France, selective sorting has focused on the so-called “recyclable” portion of waste. But, if the processing sectors for paper, cardboard and most metals are functional, this is far from being the case for the majority of plastics. If this separation effort had concerned organic waste from the outset, we can imagine that domestic practices would have evolved, that composting or transformation sectors could have developed… And that this would also have facilitated the separate collection of other waste.
Alongside methanization, there are sectors that transform biowaste into compost, which is sold to farmers and communities. What do you think ?
We must distinguish between organic household waste and that produced by certain economic activities, such as catering, which can provide biowaste that can actually be composted on an industrial scale. With household waste, it is impossible to guarantee the quality of the compost that we will recover. The cow dung that the farmer collected was of a relatively simple composition. In industrial management of household bio-waste, it is impossible to control the nature of what is found there and to carry out rigorous sorting.
Do you think that a new bioeconomy will develop in the years to come?
Without a doubt, but it is not certain that this calls into question the dominant economic logics, which are catastrophic from an ecological point of view. The rise of biowaste management start-ups is an illustration of this. We can clearly see that it is a question of considering biomass as a new black gold. The problem is that this does not address the basic problem of overproduction and overconsumption, but that, on the contrary, it contributes to making it worse. As such, there is a risk that sorting bio-waste in homes paradoxically encourages food waste practices. In the same way that we tell ourselves that it’s no big deal to buy water bottles, since they will be recycled, we will have fewer scruples about throwing our lasagna in the trash, since we tell ourselves that they will end up as fertilizer which will make tomatoes grow…
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