Feeding the earth with its peelings: this virtuous gesture does not always go without saying in the city. To encourage Lyonnais to sort their organic waste from now on, the metropolis of Lyon installed, at the end of September, 150
compost bins public areas in the 7th arrondissement, chosen for its size (82,000 inhabitants) and the diversity of its neighborhoods.
This Tuesday, elected officials came to Place Jean-Jaurès to draw up an initial assessment of this flagship initiative in its policy, since the metropolis wants to reduce household waste by 25% by 2026. Assessment which is intended to be positive, but still faces challenges limits specific to urban life.
A first collection beyond expectations
For Isabelle Petiot, vice-president of the metropolis in charge of waste reduction, the success of the terminals was immediate: “We observed the first collections with great impatience, and a little concern too, admits -it, but the expected threshold has been exceeded. Above all, we found a compost of exceptional quality, with only 3% of “unwanted”, these being made of plastic or cans.
“We collected a ton of compost, then eight, we are now at 15 tons per week: the dynamic is launched,” she says. The mayor of Lyon, Grégory Doucet, further adds that these collections help “accelerate carbon capture in the soil, which is another of our challenges to reduce the impact of global warming”.
Some quickly took the plunge …
On the side of the inhabitants, some have become “regular composters”, like Samia, a 35-year-old housewife: “I am a mother of three children and I throw away a lot of things when I prepare meals and clear their plates. That’s a lot of food waste, but at least I can get it in the bags and then in the bins ”.
Fred, a 48-year-old musician, “moaned a bit at first, because it still takes parking spaces”. “And then, finally, I already sort my papers, my bottles, so from time to time I add my little kraft bag to the batch, it doesn’t weigh any more”, he smiles.
… others fear insects and odors
A little further, towards the banks of the Rhône, Célia, a student, came to throw her glass bottles next to a compost terminal that she sulks: “I tried at the beginning, but it makes me too many garbage cans. because my kitchen is tiny. The other problem is that it attracts my cat, and I’m afraid that it will bring me insects or mice in the long run ”. A reluctance shared by Véronique, fifty-something: “Compost is good when you live in the countryside. There, in my apartment, no, unless you go there every day, it will attract animals and it will smell bad. “
Awareness-raising work will therefore have to be adapted by the president of the metropolis, Bruno Bernard (EELV), who announced on Tuesday that he wanted to “sharply increase our awareness-raising budget concerning organic waste and good practices”, in order to be able to deploy the bins ” in all urban areas of the agglomeration by 2023-2024 ”.
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