Plastic Omnium’s Ecosourcing ID & Weighing System Increases French Recycling Rates by 233% In 8 Months
posted in Articles |With spiralling waste management costs and a recycling rate of only 15%, SICTOM Loir-et-Sarthe - a local authority in Maine-et-Loire, France - needed to find a way to incentivise householders to recycle more without increasing budgets.
They decided to introduce a financial incentive whereby residents that recycled more, paid less for their waste collection. But to achieve this, they needed to understand their residents’ waste habits.
To meet this goal, Plastic Omnium’s Ecosourcing Identification and Weighing System was introduced in 2004 in five pilot regions covering 44,000 residents. The project comprised three key phases. First, a steering committee, including SICTOM and Plastic Omnium, was created to measure the success of the scheme, as well as ensure a smooth handover from the existing system.
Second, a communications campaign was devised to persuade the public to recycle more. This campaign involved press conferences, public exhibitions and magazines. Door-to-door surveys helped residents determine the most suitable waste containers for their needs - both by type and size.
The final phase of Ecosourcing’s implementation involved the distribution of waste containers and registering these containers to individual homes by fitting them with an identification tag.
The Ecosourcing ID and Weighing System enabled SICTOM to automatically weigh the waste containers and generate individual invoices based on the actual residual [ie non-recyclable] waste produced by each householder. This gave householders a clear incentive to recycle more of their waste through recycling bring banks.
Within eight months, residents’ behaviour had changed dramatically. Recycling rates leapt from an average 15% to 50%, an increase of 233%, on glass, plastic, paper/carton and metal waste flows. A reduction in waste processing costs, resulting from an overall reduction in the volume of household waste produced, provided an added bonus.
SICTOM is now considering rolling out the scheme to other regions.
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Editors’ notes:
NowRecycle.co.uk is a trading style of Plastic Omnium Systems Ltd - a European market leader in waste containment solutions that provides a wide range of waste containers and services including wheeled bins, litter bins, banks, composters and sacks. It is part of the International Plastic Omnium Group, a world leader in contract waste container solutions with worldwide sales of more than £1.8 billion. It employs over 9,000 people in 25 countries, across four continents, in manufacturing and service solutions for the automotive, environment and performance plastic products.
Press Contact: Simon Dutta, N European Marketing Director, Plastic Omnium Urban Systems Ltd
Telephone: 01952 582 583