The one who arrived at Charles De Gaulle airport has seen several fireplaces nearby the area. On 1 February we were told in the City Hall of Bobigny that not all are brick building furnaces: the Parisian people live surrounded by incinerators and landfills. And many of the neighbors have said that they've got bored, that they're not going to accept another incinerator or a TMB to dry the trash for him.

The citizens of metropolitan Paris have raised their complaints at the assembly of the Zero Waste Europe movement. What we mundane call Paris is an entire region, Ile-de-France, which brings together nearly 12 million people.

Although advertising shows tourists pictures of the capital of two million euros – the Eiffel Tower, bridges, Arc du Triomphe, Sacre Coeur and history – the traveler realizes that it is more confusing than that. As they approach the center of the subway, people's faces are bleached as they move away to the periphery. Bobigny, Courneuve, Drancy, Nantere... Television has only shown us when the clashes have taken place, but those there will also tell you that they live in Paris.

Parisiense behaves in a similar way to the elites of all the cities: to care for the center as sacred; the ugly, the dirty, everything poor for the periphery. Immigrant proletarians from the first factories. Now their precarious or unemployed children. The Caucasians, the Indians, the newcomers of the new generation...

As if the workers who go to the center to work were taken with them at the time of their return to sleep, the waste people also go with them to the periphery. The so-called Ville-Lumière (City of Light) has no space for garbage. On the contrary, Ile-de-France produces leftover garbage and has it accumulated in impressive quantities. ARIVEM member François Mouthon has called it “the largest landfill in Europe” at the Bobigny conference.

As in the nuclear power stations, France has also declared itself a champion in the incineration of urban waste. In return, selective collection and recycling is the last blow. The truth is that, even if the vendor’s propaganda says otherwise, incinerators always need landfills to bury their ashes and escorts.

The National Independent Waste Information Centre (CNIID) has up-to-date data from all over France. The departments of Ile-de-France are running a total of 19 incinerators with capacity to burn 4,273,000 tonnes of waste. It is estimated that each year 746,000 tons of slag is produced. Out of accidents. But that's not all.

The ADENCA association against the megaverteer of Claye-Souilly has denounced that, in addition to incinerators and landfills for urban waste, some districts of Ile-de-France are suffocated with industrial waste deposits, construction waste dumps, toxic and nuclear waste deposits ...

“One of the problems in our region is that at one time we have been very rich in mines. Now that we have filled the quarries, the holes and so on, they have also turned us into garbage areas.”

TMB with incinerator

The revolt against a TMB has raised the corners as in the surroundings of Paris throughout France. Although mechanical biological waste treatment (BMT) has been presented as a step away from incineration, sellers and most authorities have increased their rival groups throughout France.

People who have touched them in the neighborhood don't want to be hurt. They are easily called NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard, “Don’t put that on my portal”), but it’s true that TMB giants have given many problems (traffic, noise, stench...) to neighbors and neighbors and have caused serious accidents, including fires.

In addition, however, the public have realised that, to a large extent, in those pigeons which theoretically deal with waste in a mechanical and biological way, waste is not confined to drying for incinerators.

As if this were not enough, the quality of compost generated in MMC is in question. The simplest logic is that organic waste dumped in the scrap, however well treated, can hardly give a compost in isolation similar to that produced by the collection.

The CMT promoters have pointed out on numerous occasions that their payment will be used for agriculture, but the ARIVEM coordinator fighting the Romainville TMB has indicated that few baserritarras admit it in their field. Contaminated samples from CMT compost have been reported in the press. On the other hand, small businesses that already ate the remains of trees and street plants complain that the large TMB take everything that is vegetable to dilute the bad compost in the clean vegetable sand.

The experts of the Zero Waste movement are well aware of the different solutions mentioned under the name TMB. The key is in the collection before we start treating the waste. “If there is no good selective collection there is nothing to do,” said Enzo Favoño, who alerted the Gipuzkoans at the 2011 congress in Donostia-San Sebastián. In fact, one thing is the mechanical (recyclable parts it still has) and biological (to stabilize the final organic debris) treatment that must be applied to the final rejection after a clear separation. And very different is the one that gets into the mixed trash, which comes full of corrupt organic.

The relatives of ADECH have denounced that the CMT Canopia built in Baiona by the community of Bil and Garbi is a second option. The new TMB recently launched in Bizkaia together with Zabalgarbi is also part of the same waste management model, as a complement to the incinerator. The same is true of Romainville, the most well-known in France, in the department of Île-de-France, recently abandoned by the courts.

“We need to change paradigm” has been Bobigny’s leit motiv. “Either we reduce the waste or rot us by thickening the business of the waste.” The Bobigny meeting has served to see the chip shift of activists and movements who have seen the door-to-door pick-up in Italian Milan. At the ZWE assembly, the mayor of the city of Capanquero and the president of the commonwealth Contarina showed them that another model is possible.

When Gipuzkoa Member of the Environment, Iñaki Errazkin, explained to them that they have started on the road to selective collection and suspended an incinerator project, they stopped him with applause.