Tous les emballages se trient* !

Or, all packaging gets sorted *literally what is printed on recycling bags

I’ve been thinking about writing this for a couple of weeks, but I’m just not sure how to make it entertaining. Also, I’ve been a bit rudderless lately, for reasons I can’t really explain. Perhaps I needed to just float for a while.

One of my intentions with this Substack was to note the differences between the France I lived in from 1993 to 2006 to the France of 2023.

And one of those differences is in recycling.

One thing you need to know about me is that I have been actively recycling—or trying to do so—since, oh, 1988. I even made a recycling PSA for an assignment in one of my first video classes in college. (Fun fact: The beginning of this song was the soundtrack of my 30-second video.)

Around the time my first child was born, the French grocery chain E. LeClerc announced that they would no longer be offering plastic bags. They would instead offer a reusable bag for something like five francs, or about a dollar—I can’t recall the exact price and can’t be bothered to look it up—but in any case, they were the first grocery to implement a ban on the thin plastic bags that still dominate in the United States. All French grocery chains eventually followed suit.

About five years later, les sacs jaunes, yellow bags, showed up where I lived. Périgny, a suburb of La Rochelle, was a test community, to see how municipal recycling would go. There were specific instructions, the only ones of which I can recall were: no yogurt containers, no paper towels, no napkins. (Those last two are still steadfast rules, to my mind.)

Fast forward some years to Lexington, where we don’t have yellow bags, but we do have Rosie the Recycler bins, and where the rules have varied from no glass! to yay, glass to no paper to holy shit, we’re working on it.

All recycling is local, don’tcha know.

And now here in rural Charente, I am dealing with yellow bags again. I was horrified to see what my friends were putting in said bags. Legit, I was kind of twitchy; there was SO much shitty plastic that would need to go straight into the garbage at home.

But then I looked at the packaging labels and what could be put in the tri. (Another fun fact: Our English word “triage” comes from the French verb “trier,” which means “to sort.” So “triage” means “sorting.”)

The above photo is from a four-pack of yogurt. You can recycle the outer packaging (étui), the film that seals the yogurt container (opercule), and the container itself (pot). Mind? Blown.

Dudes…I can’t even. Sooooo much packaging that would be thrown in the trash in Lexington can be put in the tri here. And I marvel at how much I’m putting in my yellow bag, and how little goes in the trash bag. If you live in a place where this is possible, that’s great! But everywhere I have lived, there have been restrictions on what can be recycled, until now.

Maybe it’s a sham, and everything’s getting incinerated somewhere. But even that doesn’t really bother me, because La Rochelle used to—and might still—produce a bunch of electricity via its trash incinerator.

NB: YES! Reducing plastic usage and packaging is key, but that’s a story for another post.