France fined by the European Union

One and a half billion euros! This is the sum paid in 2023 by France to the European Union for not having respected its objectives for the treatment of plastic waste.

The amount revealed in an official report which clearly shows that France is a bad student. 23% of plastic packaging waste recycled against a target of 40%, when Slovakia is at 60%, Belgium or Spain above 50%, we are far from the mark indeed.

Plastics are everywhere: just come back from the supermarket and review your purchases: water or milk bottles, yogurt pots, meat trays, film around fruits and vegetables. Plastic is the king of our packaging and our trash cans and that’s without counting its presence outside of packaging in our phones or computers, in our cars, in our toothbrushes, in many textiles or the pipes used in construction.

For each French person, that’s 70 kilos of plastic consumed each year. It’s around 40 kg in Germany and 30 in the United Kingdom. However, France has taken, before others, unprecedented measures to limit some of these plastics. For example, straws or cotton buds banned from 2021 by the so-called Agec law which sets in particular a target of ending single-use plastics by 2040.

If plastics are not recycled in our country, what happens to them?

Nearly half of plastic waste is burned, this is called energy recovery, to produce heat for example. The rest ends up in landfill or in the oceans. Ademe, the French Environmental Agency, uses an image: a garbage truck of plastic waste ends up in the sea every minute. The equivalent of a truck. Translated into figures, this is several million tons per year, from bottles to microplastics that end up in the oceans. This is THE main pollution for these maritime areas.

Plastic has consequences on biodiversity, on health but also on greenhouse gas emissions. The report of the secretariat for ecological planning reiterates it: plastic emits nearly 2 billion tons of CO2 per year, most of it during its production and this continues to increase because this production is increasing exponentially on a global scale.

What and how to do then to improve the situation?

We must try to limit this production. This is the objective of an international treaty that is under discussion and should be completed before the end of the year. At the French level, the report cites several avenues such as reducing production but also improving collection and recycling, working on plastics that are easier to recycle (yogurt pots for example, it is very complicated to recycle them today and yet the source is enormous: 15 billion pots purchased each year…).

On an individual level, we can make a few gestures: avoid buying a new phone every year, and, since it’s summer and it’s hot: ditch the water bottle and opt for a water bottle, for example.