Alternative Techniques to Large Urban Networks: The Misunderstandings about the Success of On-Site Composting in Paris

ABSTRACT

In countries of the North, shared on-site composting has been popular with actors, institutions, and inhabitants. Based on field work conducted in Paris, this article shows that public institutions are disqualifying these low-tech techniques for providing urban services, while residents involved in composting do it mostly for pleasure. This difference in the aims of decentralized techniques and large networks merits being taken into account when designing more efficient urban services, which can connect large networks and on-site techniques. Achieving such coordination would imply reversing the way in which urban services are organized. Instead of setting up techniques that uniformly collect waste throughout a territory, services should be designed in view of the demand for the finished product. This leads to questioning the concept of public service and asking what a city has to offer to its inhabitants. Does a city owe its inhabitants a uniform collection system, while reducing the waste that goes into landfills? Or should it guarantee a long-term reduction in the generation of the amount of waste produced?

KEYWORDS:

• Large technical networks
• urban waste
• decentralized techniques
• composting
• residents

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note on Contributor

Elisabeth Lehec is a teaching and research assistant in the Urban Engineering Department of Université Gustave Eiffel.

Notes

1 Large technical networks of household waste are characterized, for example, by the centralized management of a whole city (with universal and uniform collection of household waste), and processing outside urban areas in large infrastructures (enabling economies of scale). In this case, the movement of material flows which is not circular—i.e., most household waste is still landfilled or incinerated without being recycled, and the flow of matter does not return to the city and is not reused (see Barles, 2005; Melosi, 2005).

2 The Agence De l’Environnement et de la Maîtrise de l’Énergie (ADEME) is a public institution supervised by the Ministry for the Ecological and Inclusive Transition, and by the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation. The ADEME accompanies and/or finances communities in the implementation of projects related to waste, climate, and management etc. It is the State’s operational arm for environmental management.

3 Directive No. 2008/98/EC on waste November 19, 2008.

4 Local composting is developed as an effective waste management device in rural areas where industrial collection cannot be developed, for material or financial reasons. See examples in France (Le Dauphiné Libéré, 2012) or in Spain (Deputacion de Pontevedra, 2020).

5 Most of the energy provided in the organic matter which generates biowaste is contained in what we actually eat. Thus, industrial anaerobic digestion techniques are not very efficient. Its complexity makes the process very costly and produces a relatively small amount of energy (Djatkov et al., 2010; ADEME, 2014; Achinas et al., 2017. Scarlat et al., 2018).

6 This branch of technique anthropology was founded by Leroi-Gourhan (Leroi-Gourhan, 1992; Guchet, 2008) and his successors (Balfet et al., 1978; Balfet, 1991; Cresswell, 2003; Lemonnier, 2004; 2012). These authors consider that a technique is partly determined by matter. They thus take a more deterministic and less relational approach than many sociologists of innovation (Bruno Latour, for example).

7 The implementation of chaînes opératoires (a method which has been developed by anthropologists to study material processes) of on-site composting and industrial composting actually shows that these two composting scales belong to the same technical trend, because they both put biowaste in similar conditions to transform it into compost. The specificity of on-site composting lies in the low volume and the frequency of inputs (residents go to the compost bin at least once a week and put in a small amount of waste, approximately 10 liters), which contributes to the quality of the final compost. As a matter of fact, sorting is carried out more finely in collective composters than on industrial platforms.

8 That is, to cut the amount of waste that is going into landfills.

9 SYCTOM is para-public organization that manages the processing of household waste in large parts of the Paris region.

10 This idea that composting makes things visible as it allows sublimation of the loss of the fallen object has already been demonstrated, see in particular (Hawkins, 2006; Monsaingeon, 2017).

11 Josiane Hercule, 20th district.

12 Equality of treatment is one of the founding principles of public services in France.