After an appeal launched on Saturday by Emmanuel Macron urging the government to “maintain” the course on ecology, the eco-organization which manages the collection and sorting of household waste in France declared itself completely favorable to the generalization of a setpoint for PET plastic bottles and aluminum drink cans.
“”The instruction is a powerful lever in favor of recycling and will certainly be the subject of many discussions in the coming weeks“, said Anne-Sophie Louvel, Director operations and territories of Citeo, during a telephone briefing with the press.
This system, “absolutely key”, according to the Head of State, must make it possible in particular to fight against plastic pollution which invades the planet. The subject, currently debated in Nice at the UN top on the ocean (UNOC), will be at the center of a new series of international negotiations in early August in Geneva, after the failure of Busan discussions in South Korea at the end of November on the reduction of plastic waste.
Evoked for several years, the instruction project in France was finally postponed to the Greek calendars in 2023 before the hostility of the communities, which finance the sorting centers of waste.
France, bad student
While they have invested a lot in recent years to modernize the machines that sort the packaging thrown into the yellow trash cans, they feared losing the manna from the resale of used and sorted, highly sought -after raw materials.
In the meantime, the instructions have still set up at low noise in recent years, at the instigation of drinks producers who have installed a thousand recovery machines in shopping centers: consumers bring their bottles there against a remote of a few cents.
Emmanuel Macron called on on Saturday, on Saturday called on the government to “continue the combat on the instruction” of plastic. Because France is a bad student as well on the collection of waste and on their recycling.
While Europe has set itself the objective of managing to collect 90% of drinking bottles and cans by 2029, France is “barely 53%”, underlined Ms. Louvel.
On the recycling side, statistics are hardly better. Faced with an objective of 55% recycling in the EU in 2029, France is “barely 28, even 30%” this year, underlines Ms. Louvel. For aluminum packaging, the European objective is 60% recycling and France caps at 37%.
Despite the enlarged and simplified sorting instructions of the yellow bin set two years ago by Citeo (all packaging, whether in paper, cardboard, plastic, aluminum or steel, must be thrown into the yellow trash can), the first results do not show massive progression of collection and recycling rates.
“Balance”
On the other hand, in a few months, Ireland has almost reached 75% collection rate, thanks to the instruction, Citeo Note.
But the device must remain “complementary” to that of yellow bins, it “must not be done at the expense of a stakeholder and must be (…) balanced between the different actors “warns Laurent Grave-Raulin, Secretary General of Citeo, who wants him to remain within the current framework of the REP (system known as “expanded producer responsibility“, or”pollutor-payer“).
It could be extended to the public space, the streets of streets not being associated with recycling, while they receive nearly 60,000 tonnes of recyclable material each year (against 6 million tonnes in the yellow trash cans).
To implement the instructions, a decree is necessary according to the leader of Citeo.
CITEO also favors the setpoint for reuse, that is to say the return of packaging which will be washed, re-filled and reused. An experiment with glass bottles and jars will thus be launched this week in several regions.