On the heights of the town of Saint-Chamas, in the Bouches-du-Rhône, in what remains of the Recyclage Concept 13 sorting company, 30,000 cubic meters of plastics, half-calcined construction materials, are piled up there, illegally. That’s thirty times more than what was allowed there.
This mountain of waste partially burned last December for almost a month, with, in passing, pollution measured by Atmosud equivalent to that of Beijing on bad days. This fire took place just before a compliance check and the registers burned. The boss of this company has just been indicted for trafficking in waste.
Fabrice and Isabelle, a couple of neighbours, saw this mountain rise every day as the dump trucks rotated. “The waste arrived and it always filled up… Once the building was full, waste ended up outside. It looked more like a huge garbage can than a treatment plant.“, describes Fabrice. “Inevitably, we are angry because it is not the only one. There have been some everywhere, never under the same name, but we suspect that it comes from the same mafia“, continues Isabelle.
The reality is that this organized gang trafficking totally imitates the methods of the mafia. Jean Sansonne directs Sos corruption in the Bouches-du-Rhône and he makes the connection: “It is certain that the storage that was on this site did not come from Saint-Chamas but was imported. When a company says it recycles by renting a simple hangar, without having a receptacle to manage wastewater, and this company changes its name every two years, the conclusion is self-evident.“
How do these scammers generate money? They create a company with a derisory capital. They declare themselves as a sorter-recycler, apparently comply with the regulations on so-called non-polluting waste and charge at a bargain price – less than 180 euros per ton – the lifting and false recycling of industrial waste to bury it or sometimes get rid of it. internationally. It is then millions of euros at stake that evaporate with more or less complex arrangements of overbilling via accomplice companies.
Richard Hardouin, the president of France nature environment in the Bouches-du-Rhône, describes a “procedure which is copied from that of the Neapolitan mafias“, perfectly controlling waste traffic throughout Europe. He is working with local elected officials on a bill to better control so-called non-hazardous waste storage facilities.
For his part, the mayor of Saint-Chamas revealed to us that he had been threatened. Didier Khelfa had never talked about it before. Pushing for the compliance of the company that polluted his municipality earned him direct pressure.
“It earned me a few threats. I was followed, I was intimidated. Is it the mafia? I don’t know, I’ve never faced it before.”
Didier Khelfa, mayor of Saint-Chamasat franceinfo
He recounts having met the operators of the company twice: “The first time, I met a young woman telling me that she was self-employed and that she was the manager of the site. A few months later, she came back with her father, claiming to have never told me that, explaining that it was her father who was the manager. These people are irresponsible at best, thugs and environmental criminals at worst.”
On the side of the national gendarmerie, it is the OCLAESP, the Central Office for the fight against attacks on the environment and public health, which monitors and hunts these crooks. The company Recyclage Concept 13 of Saint Chamas was one of its targets during the last net carried out against this environment. At the beginning of May, under the direction of the JIRS of Marseille, a specialized jurisdiction, an operation locked up two presumed sizes of this traffic, including a figure of regional banditry, the Gardois Richard Perez nicknamed “the king of trash cans”. It would have delivered more than 6,000 tonnes of waste to Saint-Chamas. In this operation, the investigation of which is still in progress, three other alleged crooks and six companies were indicted for transport, irregular operation and the burning of a waste disposal centre.
International waste trafficking is the second source of revenue for banditry in Europe, after drugs. “Criminal groups that are involved in waste trafficking use the modus operandi of banditryassures the boss of OCLAESP, Sylvain Noyau. Anonymized telephones, encrypted messaging, beacon detectors, the use of false documentation, corruption… On our side, we use absolutely the same techniques as those we use against traditional banditry, with network infiltrations or the placement of microphones in private spaces.”