Between revival and fire: the forgotten stage of industrial composting—the abandoned middle way of household waste treatment (Ile-de-France, 1940s-1990s)

The history of urban organic waste treatment has focused on major technical innovations and dominant socio-technical trajectories, while partly neglecting alternative agricultural recycling techniques. However, these practices actually persisted for a long time in certain local contexts. In the Paris region, a share of the waste flows from the towns in the agglomeration continued to be channelled towards the cultivated soils of the neighbouring countryside between the 1940s and the 1990s. This was done, however, in a fairly decentralised way and outside the major technical networks. In today’s all-network system, all waste enters a destruction-dispersion cycle involving incineration plants or burial in landfill sites. This treatment was imposed rather belatedly and is almost unchallenged. But alternative techniques such as composting actually experienced a certain revival in the previous period. Industrial composting developed briefly around the 1960s. However, it did not survive the 1970s, which profoundly reconfigured the balance of power and hierarchy between technologies. Yet by following the trajectory of these alternatives, a different history of waste treatment emerges, in which town and country maintained fertile organic links before they definitively(?) separated at the end of the 20^th century. This history allows us to sketch out some of the reasons for this short-lived success and subsequent failure.