Between revival and fire: the forgotten step of industrial composting, an abandoned middle way of household waste treatment (Île-de-France, 1940s – 1990s)

Since it has focused on major technical innovations and dominant socio-technical trajectories, the recent history of urban organic waste treatment has partially neglected agricultural recycling techniques. However, some of them were still in use quite recently in different territorial contexts. In the Paris region for instance, between the 1940s and the 1990s, part of the waste flows of the urban agglomeration continued to be evacuated separately from the main technical networks, and in a fairly decentralised way, towards the cultivated soils of the neighbouring countryside. Before the recent domination of a hypercentralised system that directs waste almost exclusively to destruction-dispersion by incineration, or to dumping in landfills, alternative techniques such as composting even experienced a period of revival. Industrial composting thus had a short-lived success for a few years around 1960. However, it did not survive the 1970s, a decade that profoundly reconfigured power relations and hierarchies between technologies. By following the trajectory of these recycling alternatives, another history of waste treatment takes shape, in which cities and countryside maintain fertile organic links before enacting their final (?) separation at the end of the 20th century. This perspective allows us to outline reasons for this ephemeral success and for its subsequent failure.