Beyond the political debate caused by its closure on December 31, we visited Nicole’s waste treatment site and learned about how it works.
Responsible for the Nicole waste treatment site which closes on December 31, Michel Bourgoin, 61, is about to turn the page with “a twinge of heart”. “I was lucky to have four presidents who trusted me. They gave me the tools to make the place prosper.” He joined him in 2002.
While fighting against odor nuisance and plastic blast, his job consists in particular of monitoring “the pumps here and there” for leachate (1) and biogas. “You have to have the right settings on the biogas wells to run the turbines and have maximum efficiency,” he explains. Nothing is done at random in Nicole. He mentions, for example, the compaction system where the work is done by belt, “without walking everywhere”. “With bad weather, if we compact the waste too much, there is immediately a fermentation on the top”.
Figure of the site, he knew the time when the effluents were not treated on site. “The biogas was burned in a flare whereas today we produce electricity”. It is the evolution of “the world of waste” that has marked him the most during these twenty years. “There was, he said, a lot less packaging.”
Hired at Smictom (2) in November 1988, he worked as a ripper, a replacement driver, he went through the workshop and the sorting center before being in charge of Nicole. “I come to retirement with the feeling of having made a career without falling into the routine”.
He’s not gone yet. In January, he will join ValOrizon in Damazan. But… ValOrizon is responsible for the 30 years of post-exploitation. “The land can move, you have to watch it. The waste will deteriorate, there will be drilling to be done to fetch gas and leachate. Discharges will always be treated. We cannot really say that it closes. Me or another, it will be necessary to go to the daily newspaper “.
Atmosphere from another world … On the heights of Nicole, the mist did not rise on this humid December morning. In the low, gray sky, hundreds of seagulls fly over a lake of garbage slowly crossed by a cogwheel compactor. Torn black bags reveal the bowels of a society sick with its overconsumption. In the heat of summer, it is smoke that can obscure the horizon. Here, it sometimes burns. All it takes is a spark: an error in sorting, a ray of sunshine in a piece of glass, a cigarette badly extinguished by a copper gleaner. During the ascent to the last locker, leachate collection wells, this black and sticky juice produced by the decomposition of household waste, emerge from the earth in a vegetated area where photovoltaic panels will one day grow. On the right, at the start of the climb, there is the treatment station where the blood from the landfill is “cleaned”. Four agents from ValOrizon, the departmental waste treatment union, work in Nicole for a few more days. Dump trucks from the south-west of Lot-et-Garonne will no longer cross the barrier from January 1. The former limestone quarry of Lafarge cements received non-hazardous waste for forty years. 30,000 tonnes per year.
A lake of garbage
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