They have become the familiar companions of our modern lives. Abandoned on beaches, trapped in glaciers or massed in massive vortexes in the oceans, waste has invaded every environment, colonizing even living organisms. Either microscopic or cumbersome, in solid, liquid or gaseous form, it is charting new global paths on the seas, saturating the air and soil, and is now invading space. Sometimes described as “ultimate” or “forever pollution,” it is making its way onto our plates, drinking water, right down to the tips of our hair.
The figures are startling. The World Bank warned that annual solid waste production now exceeds 2 billion tonnes worldwide and is set to reach 3.4 billion by 2050. That of plastics has doubled in 29 years, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), two-thirds of which is landfilled, incinerated or discharged into the environment.
While this omnipresence is having a direct impact on the health of humans and ecosystems, it also represents human activities’ indelible imprint on the Earth. From the first piles left at cave entrances, detritus tells the story of Homo sapiens as a witness to its sedentarization. Now, it also attests to the shift toward the Anthropocene, the moment when the human species began to modify living conditions on Earth, turning itself into a telluric force on a par with the Sun or plate tectonics, and thus ushering in a new geological era.
The symptom of a sick system
Researchers at the International Union of Geological Sciences are still not sure about the exact date of this turning point. Should we take into account the the early industrial revolution’s gaseous carbon dioxide concentrations, the radioactive traces of the nuclear explosions of the second half of the 20th century or the more recent appearance of plastiglomerates, plastic rocks made of synthetic materials that are sometimes clumped with sand, shells or coral? “Whatever the date, geologists agree that the undeniable proof of this shift lies in the accumulation of human activity’s remains in the strata of the planet’s upper layer,” noted sociologist Baptiste Monsaingeon. In his 2017 book Homo Detritus. Critique de la Société du Déchet (Homo Detritus. Critique of a Society of Waste), he suggested the term “poubellocène” (“garbage-cene”) to describe this new era of waste.
In this desolate landscape, recycling has become public policy’s be-all and end-all solution, the green promise of a better future. In France, the latest decision on this issue concerns local authorities’ handling of bio-waste collection, which has been mandatory since January 1. In less than 30 years, our garbage cans have been transformed into mines of “urban raw materials,” argued Sabine Barles, a city planner and technical and environmental historian. But this “garbage rush,” as the urban planner Jérémie Cavé put it (Conflits dans les Mines Urbaines de Déchets, “Conflicts in Urban Waste Mines”), also raises questions. Can the circular economy handle this daily renewed sediment? Is better waste management enough to continue producing it? Or is it a symptom of a sick system in need of a revamp?
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