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ENVIRONMENT

All French households will have to be offered composting bin

Every household in France must be able to recycle food waste at home from January 1st, 2024, the government has announced, as local authorities will be obliged to offer composting bins.

Published: 16 September 2022 14:02 CEST
All French households will have to be offered composting bin
(Photo by Eric Piermont / AFP)

All local authorities will be obliged to offer households means of sorting biodegradable waste at source, such as separate bins for collection, individual or collective composting.

The aim is to recycle bio-waste, which consists mainly of peelings, kitchen products and meal leftovers, in the form of compost or fuel instead of burying or burning it, in order to reduce greenhouse gas production.

Local authorities will have to propose solutions allowing households to carry out this sorting at home – although several dozen authorities across France already offer this service.

Currently, local authorities or businesses whose annual production exceeds 10 tonnes or 60 litres for oils are required to sort bio-waste at source. From January 1st, 2023, the volume will be lowered to five tonnes, before being abolished altogether – and therefore requiring all local authorities to act – on January 1st, 2024.

According to the Environmental Code, bio-waste is classed as “non-hazardous biodegradable garden or park waste, food or kitchen waste from households, offices, restaurants, wholesale trade, canteens, caterers or retail outlets, as well as comparable waste from food processing plants”.

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ENVIRONMENT

The guardian angels of the source of the Seine

The river Seine, the centrepiece of the Paris Olympics opening ceremony in July, starts with a few drops of water in a mossy grotto deep in the woods of central France.

Published: 25 April 2024 09:43 CEST
The guardian angels of the source of the Seine

And not a day goes by without Jacques and Marie-Jeanne Fournier going to check the source only a few paces from their door.

“I go there at least three times a day. It’s part of me,” 74-year-old Marie-Jeanne told AFP.

Her parents were once the guardians of the source, and now that unofficial mantle has fallen on her and husband Jacques.

Barely 60 souls live in the village of Source-Seine in the wooded hills north of Dijon.

By the time the tiny stream has reached the French capital 300 kilometres away it has become a mighty river 200 metres wide.

But some mornings barely a few damp traces are visible at the source beneath the swirling dragonflies. If you scratch about a bit in the grass, however, a small stream quickly forms.

The source — one of two spots where the river officially starts — bubbles up through the remains of an ancient Gallo-Roman temple built about 2,000 years ago, said Jacques Fournier, 73.

Celtic goddess

But you could easily miss this small out-of-the-way valley. There are few signs to direct tourists to the statue of the goddess Sequana, the Celtic deity who gave her name to the river.

In the mid-19th century Napoleon III had a grotto and cave built “where the source was captured to honour the city of Paris and Sequana,” said Marie-Jeanne Fournier.

Her parents moved into a house next to the grotto and its reclining nymph in the early 1950s when she was four years old.

Her father Paul Lamarche was later appointed its caretaker and would regularly welcome visitors. A small stone bridge over the Seine while it is still a stream is named after him.

“Like most children in the village in the 1960s,” Fournier learned to swim in a natural pool in the river just downstream from her home.

“It was part of my identity,” said Fournier, who has lived all her life close to rivers. She retired back to Source-Seine to run a guesthouse because “the Seine is a part of my parents’ legacy”.

The Olympic flame is due to be carried past the site on July 12th on its way to Paris.

The couple will be there to greet it, but as members of the Sources of the Seine Association, they are worried how long the river will continue to rise near their home.

Every year the grotto has become drier and drier as climate change hits the region, where some of France’s finest Burgundy wines are produced.

“My fear is that the (historic) source of the Seine will disappear,” said Marie-Jeanne Fournier. “Perhaps the source will be further downstream in a few years.”

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