Treating Waste: The Era of Consumer Society
In the past, when waste was considered a resource, it did not need to be treated. It was either collected for free by ragpickers or, in the case of organic materials, sold to be spread in fields that supplied the urban market. The break in this cycle was due to the significant increase in volume of waste caused by urban expansion and, consequently, the deadly epidemics caused by water contamination. It was also due to the emergence of new chemical and industrial pollutants that could not be assimilated by the soil's metabolic cycle.
However, waste treatment only gradually appeared, with the initial phase consisting of removing waste and making it invisible through burial or incineration, without considering the environmental consequences. In 1886, New York dumped 80 percent of its waste into the Atlantic Ocean, a good portion of which washed back along the coast and its beaches. The arrival of automobiles was seen as a solution to the nuisances caused by horses, while the first citizen mobilizations on the subject were led by women, for aesthetic and domestic reasons. The first generations of incinerators in the United States, in the 1920s, resulted in terrible pollution, contributing to environmental inequalities. It was through their territories’ limited capacity to absorb these pollutants that cities gradually reached their limits, forcing them to gradually treat their waste and once again delegating this invisible part of the city to other actors. If waste had been managed on a national or global scale, there is no doubt that waste’s relegation to neglected and stigmatized areas without concern for treatment would have continued, as evidenced by today’s illegal trafficking of hazardous materials such as electronic waste or certain chemicals.
Grégory Quenet
In the nineteenth century, if the concept of “circular economy” did not exist, it is simply because it had always been in practice, implicitly, without needing to be defined. The few products that society considered useless and disposable often ended up in the soil or water, but they were assimilable, as they were few in number and mostly organic. A profound rupture occurred during the twentieth century, driven in particular by the chemical and petrochemical industries that fueled consumer society. As society urbanized, waste became “bulky,” to use a term still used today for some of them. Influenced by hygiene, there was a need to treat waste first as a flow, meaning transporting it out of cities by horse-drawn carriages and later trucks, as well as utilizing the kinetic force of water through sewage systems. In his book, Le Propre et le Sale, Georges Vigarello draws a parallel between these two depreciated professions: the “dawn workers” who collected garbage and the “water workers” who operated in the sewers. It was a shadowy job that made this waste invisible. Waste was then stored in landfills, increasingly farther away as rapid urbanization brought people closer to their own piles of garbage. No one wanted to live near these cesspools, amidst the foul odors. The twentieth century marked the culmination of the long process of the “olfactory silence” of cities, as beautifully named by Alain Corbin in his seminal work on smell and social imagination, Le Miasme et la Jonquille.
From this visceral need for cleanliness, a profession was born: waste collection and transportation, which revived the same debate as water services in the late nineteenth century, regarding the choice between municipal management and public service delegation. Unlike water distribution services, which saw the creation of two private giants, the Compagnie Générale des Eaux (CGE, now Veolia) and the Lyonnaise des Eaux (now Suez), waste management and garbage collection services were in the main run by small local and artisanal companies initially, as they required fewer resources. Even during the First World War, these small companies’ organization was not questioned, despite facing a series of difficulties (staff shortages, horse requisitions, a downturn in sludge sales, expensive goods, etc.), and the city of Nantes, for example, continued its contract with the Grandjouan company, which later became a subsidiary of CGE. “Individual initiative is always better equipped to find remedies than a public administration,” claimed the municipal council in 1915. The gradual mechanization of these jobs in the 1920s, with the first garbage trucks, and later, after the Second World War, with the widespread use of compacting garbage bins, complicated the lives of all kinds of waste collectors. However, it was the explosion of consumption that made the old waste recovery system impossible.
As early as the interwar period, certain American companies theorized the concept of “planned obsolescence” to stimulate growth. Faced with declining sales, lightbulb manufacturers agreed to limit the lifespan of their products to encourage consumers to replace them more frequently. Another famous example is DuPont de Nemours, which deliberately reduced the lifespan of stockings and tights sold by the company. The increase in waste was such that historians John R. McNeill and Peter Engelke refer to it as the “great acceleration” in their book of the same name, starting from the mid-twentieth century. The challenges required larger-scale solutions to waste collection and treatment solutions, leading to the concentration of local companies within larger groups. This is the story of the CGEA (Compagnie Générale des Entreprises Automobiles), which integrated a series of local subsidiaries, such as Grandjouan for collection and transportation, USP (Union des Services Publics) for incineration plants, SEMAT (Société d'Équipement Manutention et Transports) for providing waste bins and vehicles, and Soulier, acquired from Cartonneries La Rochette, for cardboard and paper recovery.
For local authorities, these companies managed one of the least noble activities: dealing with the heaps of waste produced by society. This is a little-told story, as it is about the invisibility of our waste via its burial or incineration, a necessary condition for the immaculate cleanliness of our cities and villages. But economic and ecological logic has now come to question this new order of things.
The Explosion of Waste and Waste during the "Trente Glorieuses"
Starting from 1948, the French entered what economist Jean Fourastié called the Trente Glorieuses (the Glorious Thirty), which lasted until 1973. While, like in many countries, there was a shortage of everything after the war, the standard of living rapidly increased during these three decades. With falling product prices, the beginning of globalization, and a new form of unabashed consumption, the accumulation of goods skyrocketed. “The world of things seemed limitless: gas stoves, refrigerators, and washing machines; indoor toilets with flushes and bathrooms with water heaters; elevators and garbage chutes; Solex bicycles and cars; transistor radios and televisions; pocketbooks and ballpoint pens; Formica kitchens and plastic basins; ‘instant’ soups and frozen foods; Omo laundry detergent and Dop shampoo; jeans and miniskirts…” lists historian Jean-Claude Daumas in his article "Les Trente Glorieuses ou le bonheur par la consommation"1, published in the Revue Projet in 2018. This is an inventory, à la Prévert, that echoes "La Complainte du progrès [The Complaint of Progress]", a song recorded by Boris Vian in 1955.
This advent of consumer society was accompanied by numerous excesses, which gradually became subjects of conversation and attracted criticism from philosophers, ecologists, and economists. Overconsumption, waste, and pollution were vehemently denounced by Hannah Arendt, Jean Baudrillard, Kenneth Galbraith, René Dumont, and others. This new form of society encouraged single-use consumer goods and the planned obsolescence of products. Instead of repairing and maintaining like their predecessors, the French began to throw things away. Disposable products multiplied, such as beer or soda cans. While in 1947, 100 percent of sodas and 58 percent of beers in the United States were sold in reusable bottles; by 1971, this had dropped to only 25 percent. The challenges not only involved quantitative aspects but also qualitative ones, as waste became more complex than before, making it more difficult to recover for other uses, and sometimes taking decades, or even longer, to degrade in the environment. Waste also became industrial, medical, electronic, and nuclear. Plastic waste sits at the intersection of these two challenges, and it accumulates.
In 1960, each French person produced an average of 250 kilograms of waste per year. This number would only increase over the following decades, as growth of waste was estimated at 5 percent annually. To get rid of this accumulation of new waste, the solution was simple: it were disposed of without much care for the natural environment, through landfills, sewers, or even immersion. The issue of waste treatment became crucial, as the society of abundance rapidly polluted our waterways, soil, and air. This development was highlighted as early as 1962 by American economist and sociologist Vance Packard in The Waste Makers, as well as by Rachel Carson, the first environmentalist to raise the alarm about pesticides in her book Silent Spring that same year. The question of waste treatment slowly made its way into institutions, which began to take initial measures on the subject; authorities finally recognized the nuisance caused by waste and started to regulate it. In 1972, the London Convention regulated waste disposal at sea, including hazardous waste such as industrial sludge or radioactive materials. It was one of the first international conventions for the protection of the marine environment against human activities.
Back When Garbage Trucks Were Electric
Is the electric car the future of the automobile? Difficult to say, but it is certainly its past. Contrary to what many imagine, the first electric vehicle dates back to 1834. It was designed by American Thomas Davenport and, at the time, resembled a locomotive. In 1859, Gaston Planté developed the first rechargeable battery, an invention that allowed Thomas Parker to build what is sometimes considered the first electric car in 1884, even though it resembled a horseless carriage.
Quickly, electric cars proved to be very competitive: they were reliable, easy to start, left no smoke in their wake, and cost less to build than gasoline cars. In 1898, the Automobile Club de France organized a “competition for automobile carriages” that highlighted the superiority of electric vehicles.
After the initial tests, eleven electric carriages and only one gasoline-powered one qualified to participate. At the end of the competition, the jury pronounced an implacable sentence: “It now seems established through experience that the petrol-driven motor carriage cannot constitute a system for operating public cars in a large city.”
It should be noted that the initial use of automobiles primarily involved municipal services in major cities: mail, taxis, buses, trams, and...garbage collection! In 1900, electric taxis roamed the streets of New York and, in 1904, the city of Paris also equipped itself for interurban mail distribution. In Great Britain, milk bottles were transported from house to house in electric trucks at the beginning of the twentieth century. After World War I, oil temporarily became expensive, and the cost-effectiveness calculations quickly made sense for municipalities.
In the 1920s and 1930s, garbage trucks began to become widespread in big cities, gradually replacing the old horse-drawn carts. Founded in 1925 and based in Villeurbanne, Sovel (Société de véhicules électriques) quickly established itself in the manufacture of trucks dedicated to waste collection and road maintenance. Antoine Joulot, an engineer from the mines and an administrator for CAMIA (Compagnie auxiliaire des municipalités pour l'industrie et l'assainissement), quickly realized the potential of these electric machines. He envisioned them being powered by electricity from the incinerators that his company operated in France, in parallel with the steam used in heat networks.
After Villeurbanne, Antoine Joulot conducted an experiment in Tours, where CAMIA—which would later be acquired by CGEA, a future subsidiary of Veolia—managed an incineration plant: at a speed of twenty kilometers per hour, a Sovel truck could collect garbage for forty to fifty kilometers before going to recharge at the plant.
The system was then replicated as part of a mixed management contract in Bourges in 1930: the company La Berruya (which included CAMIA) for the operation of the incinerator, Sovel for the collection of household waste using electric vehicles. The batteries were charged at night when the electric vehicles were idle. The electric motor, signed by Jacques Frères companies, was originally located at the rear of the vehicle (hence the very flat and vertical shape of the front cabin hood).
In Bourges, collection was carried out by five electric trucks with tilting bins closed by sliding covers. The two six-horsepower electric motors and the Tudor lead-acid battery with 380 ampere-hours had to pull five tons of payload! These electric trucks perfectly met the needs of garbage collectors: reduced speed, sufficient autonomy for a neighborhood, ability to maneuver through narrow streets, no noise nuisance, no inhalable pollution, and low energy cost.
And that's not all: mastering the driving of such a vehicle did not require any specific training. As historian Alain Belmont writes in an article, “In a Sovel truck, there was no clutch, no gearbox, no carburetor, and of course, no internal combustion engine, so there were almost no possible breakdowns. Considered indestructible, these trucks sometimes kept running for nearly fifty years!” The batteries, located in the middle of the vehicle to evenly distribute the weight, were easy to recharge from the power grid and were covered by a maintenance contract that offered several years of warranty. By the 1920s, gasoline cars were becoming much more competitive, and their prices dropped drastically, especially for the Ford Model T, which cost three hundred dollars by the end of the decade—an affordable amount for a worker. But the shortages and restrictions of World War II gave a second life to Sovel's garbage trucks. The cleaning and transportation company Grandjouan (a future subsidiary of Veolia) put two electric compacting bins into service in 1942 in Nantes. Sovel trucks were still used until the 1960s–1970s, for example in sanitation in Lyon or for garbage collection in Rouen and Courbevoie. Despite these sporadic uses, gasoline and diesel cars gained the upper hand over electricity, which could not compete in terms of cost, autonomy, and recharge speed, and Sovel definitively closed its doors in 1977.
© Balaji Srinivasan
In France, Laurence Rocher, a lecturer in planning and urbanism, points out that “the organization of waste collection and treatment was characterized by the absence of a dedicated national policy. The regulatory framework was produced by different ministries according to the sectors producing waste.” The Ministry of Equipment was responsible for waste from public works and urban planning, the Ministry of Agriculture for agricultural waste, the Ministry of Industry for waste from manufacturing activities, and so on.
The creation of a Ministry of the Environment in 1971, whose initial objective was to combat noise pollution, allowed for the structuring of the waste sector. Thus, on July 15, 1975, the first major law on waste management was enacted, contemporaneous with similar laws in Germany and the United States, and served as the basis for national environmental regulations. It stipulated that local authorities now had the responsibility for the collection and disposal of household waste from their constituents in approved locations. The waste producer also became responsible for their waste. This was a turning point. “When the law took effect, industrial companies asked us to dispose of their waste while demanding guarantees that the waste would be treated in accordance with regulations,” recalls Alexander Mallinson, regional director at Veolia, who was responsible for waste recycling and recovery activities. It was thanks to these regulatory measures that local authorities increasingly turned to private service providers like CGEA (Veolia's future subsidiary) through public service delegations. As environmental protection rules multiplied, waste treatment facilities became more technical, and the use of CGEA became the norm.
From the Professionalization of Landfills to Industrial Ecology Hubs
Until the 1970s, the state’s priority was hygiene and public health, and environmental protection was only an additional consideration. But things gradually changed, as Laurence Rocher analyzes in her thesis “Governing Waste”: “These concerns regarding hygiene, environmental protection, and the reduction of nuisances led to the rejection of uncontrolled landfills as a disposal method and the acceptance of controlled landfills.” In 1972, although 80 percent of the French population had access to waste collection and treatment services, disparities between large cities and rural areas remained significant. Thus, a large part of the territory had no access to any collection or treatment system. As a result, waste continued to feed illegal landfills. In 1978, the National Agency for Waste Recovery and Disposal (ANRED), the predecessor of ADEME (the Agency for Ecological Transition), launched the France Propre (“Clean France”) program. Thanks to this program, it is estimated that 1,500 illegal landfills were eliminated or rehabilitated.
But the 1980s were also marked by several environmental scandals, particularly concerning fraudulent waste management, which accelerated the transformation of the sector. One of the most emblematic scandals was the Montchanin landfill in Saône-et-Loire, where hundreds of thousands of tons of industrial and hazardous waste were dumped by trucks from all over Europe for ten years.
It all started in 1976 when the mayor of the municipality entrusted an eight-hectare plot of land to a waste operator, Luc Laferrère, who was supposed to establish the first controlled landfill in Burgundy. Only household waste was allowed on the site. Trucks registered in France, as well as in Belgium, Germany, and even Switzerland, dumped their waste, which was then covered with soil. This strange activity caught the attention of the local residents, who quickly complained about the nuisances caused by the landfill—especially the odors. In 1981, a few residents of Montchanin founded the Association for the Defense of the Montchanin Environment to address the issues related to the landfill.
The living conditions and health of the residents became increasingly alarming: several general practitioners in the municipality observed an increase in consultations for respiratory problems and irritation of the mucous membranes. In a series of articles in the Journal de Saône-et-Loire dedicated to the environmental scandal, Pierre Barrellon, a resident of the municipality and whistleblower, explained the cause of the nuisances: “It was chemical industrial waste, as well as hospital waste. We will never really know what was buried here, but it was anything but harmless. The origin of the trucks and the reading of several subsequent reports suggest that scrapings from contaminated sites, hydrocarbons, paints, solvents, sulfur, toluene, benzene, and even phosphorus, which ignited upon contact with air, must have been buried in Montchanin. Long-term and diverse pollutants. Unstable products whose evolution, or even reactions when they come into contact with each other, cannot be predicted by anyone.” Thanks to the mobilization of the residents, the government suspended the landfill's activities in 1987 before definitively closing the site in 1989.
It was not until 1998 that a trial began, when 80 percent of the adults in the town joined as civil parties. However, in legal terms, “it was much ado about nothing,” to quote Pierre Barrellon, who was also the deputy mayor from 1995 to 2008. The operators were sentenced to three years of suspended imprisonment and a fine of 150,000 francs.
However, the political impact was quite different. The media coverage of the scandal had a strong influence on the creation of the July 1992 Royal Law on Waste Disposal. Its rapporteur in the Senate, Bernard Hugo, estimated at the time of its examination that it was “crucial to restore public confidence, which was marked by the Montchanin scandal,” while also believing that “the evolution of the waste management market represents an economic development opportunity for French industrial companies in this sector, which have significant technical expertise.”
The Royal Law promoted the environmental quality of landfill sites. It put an end to existing landfills by providing financial incentives for the restoration of collective municipal waste disposal facilities and the remediation of land polluted by these facilities. The law also aimed to definitively close small illegal rural landfills. And indeed, in recent years, landfill management has become more professionalized, thanks to specialized companies like CGEA. The landfill sites, previously owned by a wide range of owners, including individual holders and civil engineering companies (“the ‘REP’ in Claye-Souilly initially stood for Routière de l'Est parisien!” recalls Didier Courboillet, Deputy General Manager of Recycling and Waste Recovery in France) will see their organization become more streamlined. In the 1980s and 1990s, CGE and its subsidiaries acquired landfill sites to manage them in a more standardized manner.
Control of waste at the entrance, strict distinctions between ordinary waste and hazardous waste, the impermeability of landfill cells, leachate recovery and treatment, the reduction of nuisances for nearby populations… The management of these sites has proven to be demanding, especially as new expectations for the circular economy emerged in the 1990s.
These sites are still necessary for the disposal of non-recyclable waste, and according to ADEME, there are still 36,000 illegal landfills in 2022. But they have gradually transformed into industrial ecology hubs, accumulating functionalities. They develop their energy production from buried waste, converting methane from the fermentation of organic waste into electricity or biogas. The Claye-Souilly landfill has thus become one of the largest biomethane production units in Europe and an emblematic site for renewable energy production in the Île-de-France region.
They also incorporate recycling, the composting of plant waste, transformation of bottom ash, and valorization of used tires, among other functions, while making room for other facilities. For example, Veolia inaugurated its first waste collection centers as early as 1986. As sorting centers were established, the company began to close old landfills. This was the case with the Tougas landfill, which closed its doors in 1992, and Veolia took charge of its post-operation. “This means that we ensure the end-of-life management of the landfill, installing drains, gas capture systems, covering it, and monitoring its evolution and effluents. It is a great responsibility because we have to ensure the management of potential pollutants,” explains Annaïg Pesret-Bougaran, director of the Arc-en-Ciel sorting center in Couëron, Loire-Atlantique, which was built a few kilometers from the now-closed landfill site. Its seventy hectares have been replaced by tree hedges and photovoltaic panels.
Post-operation also ensures, according to specific health and environmental rules, the progressive restoration of these spaces that were borrowed from nature. At the Claye-Souilly site in Seine-et-Marne, Veolia is responsible for replanting the largest forest in Seine-et-Marne since the nineteenth century, when the department was extensively deforested to meet the demand for wood supply and agricultural land development.
Incineration: The First Alternative to Landfill
Originally, the two basic waste treatment methods were landfilling and incineration. Both processes have contributed to the cleanliness of cities since the late nineteenth century. At that time, landfills were more often located in rural areas, while incinerators were found in urban areas. This distribution was driven by cross-cutting imperatives of public health (waste placed in landfills could attract bugs and larger animals and pollute water) and performance (incinerators being more efficient in reducing the significant volume of urban waste). Additionally, the geographical constraints played a role, as vast and sparsely populated rural areas could more easily accommodate landfill sites, while cities required facilities with a smaller footprint.
The English were the first to develop incineration solutions in 1865, installing a modest furnace in Gibraltar to burn waste from the British army. In 1870, the first municipal incinerator was established in Paddington, a London district. At that time, these “destructors,” as they were called across the Channel, did not function well and did not burn all the waste, causing black smoke in the surrounding areas. However, newer generations of incinerators increased the efficiency of combustion and allowed for the utilization of energy for heating or electricity. According to Gérard Bertolini, a CNRS research director, “in 1906, 140 to 180 (over 150, according to other sources) English cities primarily used incineration to treat waste, and over half of them recovered the energy produced, including 45 to 65 cities linked to power plants.”
© Veolia Archives
In France, it was not until 1905 that the first incinerators were established in four waste treatment plants: in Saint-Ouen, Issy-les-Moulineaux, Romainville, and later in Ivry (in 1912). In 1927, SEPIA (Société d'Entreprises pour l'Industrie et l'Agriculture) built a modern incineration plant in Tours, capable of producing electricity and bricks from the recovered bottom ash after combustion. It was even decided at the time that waste collection would be carried out by electric trucks that could recharge directly at the plant. In the 1930s, under the influence of the hygiene movement, incineration gained significant popularity, as fire was believed to purify everything. The Union des Services Publics, a future subsidiary of the CGEA group and Compagnie Générale des Eaux, developed incinerators in Bordeaux (1932), Rouen (1933), Nancy (1933), Marseille (1935), Roubaix (1936), Monaco (1937), and Bourges (1938).
By 1939, over twenty French cities had adopted incineration. In contrast, both England and the United States gradually shifted away from incineration and towards sanitary landfilling, as certain waste did not burn well and residents began to complain about the proximity of incinerators due to the foul odors. In France, incineration continued to coexist alongside landfills after World War II: the Nanterre plant incinerated waste from seven municipalities in the western suburbs, and the city of Lyon supplied its incinerators with waste from neighboring municipalities.
Incineration experienced a renewed interest in the 1990s. The 1992 law provided for the limitation of landfilling as a waste disposal method. Its importance grew even further in 1994, when the law prohibited incineration if it did not allow for energy recovery. The objective was to valorize both the materials and the energy content of waste, which could produce heat or electricity. This led to the systematic deployment of old but previously outdated processes due to the emergence of other, cheaper energy sources, as well as the implementation of policies that encouraged industrial efficiency on their facilities. Although the 1992 law favored waste incineration over landfilling, the development of energy recovery systems progressed slowly.
In a 1999 report on waste valorization techniques, the Senate noted that out of 139 incinerators, “almost three-quarters... do not have energy recovery.” More broadly, while France was among the countries with the highest number of incinerators at that time, incinerating 40 percent of its municipal waste, it lagged behind Sweden (45 percent), Denmark (56 percent), Switzerland (60 percent), and especially Japan, where incineration was the predominant waste treatment method (75 percent). It was not until the 2000s that incineration plants transformed more widely into energy recovery facilities, while simultaneously facing—ironically—a new health challenge: air pollution. While pollution from incineration emissions was not a concern in the 1950s due to limited knowledge of its effects and composition, the situation changed in the 1970s. Environmentalists began to closely examine these issues, to the point that in 1975 the Friends of the Earth in Privas, Ardèche, filed a lawsuit against a municipal solid waste incinerator project.
“The installations were subject to dust reduction measures” during that decade, according to the journal Pour Mémoire, published by the Ministry of Ecology. Treatment of emissions further intensified in the 2000s, aided by the initiatives of companies like Veolia. Annaïg Pesret-Bougaran explains that the installation part of incinerators has evolved the most: “Initially, we had a reactor and lime milk injection with electrostatic precipitators that captured treatment residues and combustion dust. However, in 2001, the regulations changed, and the list of pollutants to be treated increased. In 2007, we carried out major renovations on our site in order to treat the exhaust gasses and monitor emissions.” In addition, air quality measurements are conducted in the region of the plant twice a year in collaboration with the Regional Directorate for the Environment, Planning and Housing (DREAL). Today, Veolia ensures compliance with these requirements in forty-five incineration units, representing 40 percent of the operational incineration plants in France.
© Christophe Finot
Furthermore, all these forty-five plants are equipped to recover energy from waste. They are often even connected to district heating networks. Waste is no longer simply treated or stored, but has become a source of value. This paradigm shift is summarized by Didier Courboillet: “In the twentieth century, we wanted to quickly get rid of waste without doing anything with it. Today, the amount of waste is still significant, but we work to extract value from it, which was already there from the start. We advocated for the creation of the law on extended producer responsibility (REP) in 1992, which gave rise to eco-organizations. Before that, when we collected waste, we filled the truck to its maximum capacity and mixed everything together. We realized that it was more productive to deconcentrate the waste flows compared to simply landfilling them and to seek value in waste.” This is a first step toward recycling, the cornerstone of the circular economy, without which the ecological issue of waste cannot be solved.
Brazil: Pollution Becomes the Solution in Landfill Sites
Not all waste is currently recyclable, and not all of it is sorted. As a result, stocks have accumulated in landfills over the decades. Among them, organic matter emits methane, a greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change when released into the atmosphere. However, if captured and transformed into biogas, this pollution can become a solution by serving as a renewable energy source of organic origin, as an alternative to fossil fuels. This change in perspective is gradually taking place in Brazil, as in many other countries.
With its 214 million inhabitants, the eighth largest economy in the world produces eighty million tons of waste each year. Half of this waste ends up in one of the three thousand illegal and uncontrolled landfills located across this largest country in the Southern Hemisphere.
To address these diffuse sources of pollution, new scenarios can now be written.
In 2021, Veolia teams inaugurated three new power plants directly installed on landfills in São Paulo, Iperó, and Biguaçu. Through professional exploitation and a focus on the circular economy, “these units will produce 12,400 kilowatts of renewable electricity from biogas derived from organic waste,” emphasizes Gustavo Migues, Director of the Latin America zone at Veolia. Importantly, the biogas supplied by these plants helps avoid the emission of forty-five thousand tons of methane into the atmosphere. These solutions can play a significant role in the evolution of Brazil's energy mix, combining with other waste-to-energy methods. Further south, Veolia has partnered with the agri-food company Camil Alimentos to manage, operate, and maintain a cogeneration plant, where ninety-five thousand tons of rice husks—the outer layer of rice discarded during the bleaching process—generate the electricity and steam needed by the facilities each year. With further research and development efforts, sugarcane bagasse could also be included in this circular economy framework.
In Turkey, an Exemplary European Installation for Converting Waste into Energy
Waste management in Turkey is a significant problem. With one of the lowest recycling rates among OECD members, barely reaching 12 percent in 2018, and an insufficient capacity to handle its estimated five million metric tons of waste per year, the country faces a major environmental challenge.
In this context, Veolia was entrusted in 2023 with the operation of Istanbul's waste-to-energy plant, in compliance with European Union environmental standards. Its mission is to bring this installation, the largest in Europe, to full capacity.
With a processing capacity of approximately 1.1 million tons of non-recyclable household waste per year, the plant will save nearly 1.5 million tons of carbon emissions annually, thanks in part to the production of 560,000 megawatt-hours of electricity, equivalent to the consumption of 1.4 million metropolitan residents. This is the first installation of its kind in Turkey, aiming to decarbonize the waste sector through the widespread adoption of energy recovery and recycling, in order to avoid carbon-intensive landfilling. This project directly contributes to the country's carbon neutrality goal by 2053, marking a new milestone in the journey towards decarbonization.
- [The Glorious Thirty or Happiness through Consumption],” Revue Projet, 2018 ↩︎