Greater Besançon has cut organic waste by more than 40 percent thanks to diverse policies — and a good dash of persistence.

Credit: Aliaksandr Antanovich.

November 10, 2025

On a blue-skied summer morning, Place Pasteur in the historic center of Besançon is abuzz with colorful market stalls selling trinkets and antiques. But it’s also here that residents bring a different kind of valuable good every weekday, to give away for free.

As time ticks by, individuals and families stroll over to a trash can with a green lid at one end of the square, open it and empty containers brought from home filled with banana skins, egg shells, carrot peel, zucchini heads, parsley stalks and more.

“I tried setting up composting in my building, but it was difficult. I always ended up having to do all the work,” says Alex, a resident who is here to drop off food scraps with his young daughter.

That circular system is just one cog in the pioneering efforts of France’s composting capital, which has been fighting for nearly two decades to cut waste. It doesn’t make financial or ecological sense to throw all our vastly different waste in the same trash can, the authorities argue, so why do we? As the world wakes up to the importance of minimizing waste and maximizing use of our planet’s finite resources, the example of Besançon, which has significantly cut the waste it produces, could provide lessons.

Besançon’s foray into fighting organic waste began around 2008 when the region’s authorities opted not to replace the older of two incinerators used to burn waste. At the time, there was public outcry against the pollution they produced, and constructing a new incinerator would have cost tens of millions of euros.

“So we decided not to renew it,” says Daniel Huot, head of waste management for Grand Besançon Métropole, or Greater Besançon, the urban region encompassing the city of Besançon, which is home to 200,000 people. “But that meant we had to work very hard to reduce the waste we produce.”

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With only one incinerator set to serve the region in the future, authorities took a highly-adaptive approach to encouraging residents to sort and reduce the waste they produced. A particular focus was given to organic waste like kitchen scraps, which are about 90 percent water, making burning them a very inefficient use of energy and a significant creator of emissions. Food waste is responsible for about 16 percent of the total emissions from the EU food system. Globally, food loss and waste account for eight to 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions — nearly five times the emissions of the aviation sector, according to the UN.

So, over the years, Greater Besançon introduced a multi-pronged strategy of communication, infrastructure and policy. It launched radio, television and newspaper campaigns to raise public awareness about household and organic waste, and introduced a levy in 2012 requiring households to pay based on the weight of their trash — the less they produced, the less they would have to pay.

It also tailored the waste collection system to urban and rural settings, and the so-called peri-urban area between the two. Some 25,000 individual households with sufficient space have been provided with trash cans for their organic waste, while 350 shared residences — apartment blocks, more or less — have been given communal organic containers, requiring resident volunteers to educate their neighbors about composting and ensure non-compostable materials aren’t deposited.

“These different approaches are all part of the fix,” says Huot. “There is not one single answer.”

Authorities had initially wanted to install permanent composting points in the historic center of Besançon to broaden the services available to households, but they were refused permission due to building regulations and lack of space. “So we were forced to rethink,” says Huot.

This was the inception of the pop-up drop-off points. In 2022, a pilot was launched. They found residents wanted longer availability times, so they were extended by two hours a day. “We realized people came earlier, so we listened and adjusted,” says Romain Pannetier, a waste collector for Trivial Compost, the private company contracted by the city to do the work.

After one year, 727 households had signed up, and more have joined since. Residents, who must sign up for access, giving them a code to open the cans, deposited 22 tons of organic waste at the half dozen drop-off points in 2024.

Improving how waste is collected and treated is one thing, but Besançon authorities have also worked hard to reduce the waste inhabitants produce to start with. In 2016, the first zero waste grocery store in Besançon, Le Vrac, opened and others soon followed. They have no packaging or single-use bags. The Zero Waste Besançon association was also created in 2018 to inform citizens and encourage decision-makers to adopt more responsible anti-waste practices.

As a result of these efforts, Greater Besançon has reduced its household waste by a remarkable 42 percent. In 2008, each inhabitant produced an average of 227 kilograms of residual household waste, which included organic waste as well as all other unrecycled waste. By 2024, that had fallen to 132 kilograms, compared to an average of 242 kilograms nationwide. Authorities estimate that 80 percent of the population in Greater Besançon now has access to composting facilities.

Chart: Peter Yeung. Source: Greater Besançon Métropole.

Manon Jourdan, who works for Zero Waste Europe, a network of associations working together to scale up zero waste initiatives across the continent, says that organic waste efforts can have a huge range of benefits, from cutting emissions to helping fight the widespread issue of degraded land in the EU.

“It’s a resource we’re not exploiting enough,” she says.

Ludovic Sixdenier, in charge of composting at Sybert, which is responsible for collecting and treating all waste in Greater Besançon, claims that, given its years of experience, the region now has one of the best systems of waste management in France.

The tens of thousands of trash cans it manages all have microchips in them, allowing the weight of each to be quickly measured and analyzed. Using this data, garbage trucks can take optimized routes to run the service.

“We have been able to make improvements over the years,” says Sixdenier.

And Besançon’s achievements took on greater relevance in January 2024, when the French government made it mandatory for municipalities to provide residents and businesses with ways to sort organic waste to be turned into biogas or compost.

Yet critics argue that while this move is significant, it is merely symbolic. Zero Waste Europe’s Jourdan says that the French law lacks oversight and accountability, such as fines. “We have cities that are doing the right thing, but others with the minimum effort,” she says. “There’s no enforcement of performance.”

She says that authorities should set the target of producing just 25 kilograms of organic waste per capita a year, pointing to examples like that of Milan, a large city whose food waste hubs allow for the collection of almost 90 percent of food waste.

Policies such as raising taxes for landfill and incineration, and issuing levies based on the amount of waste a household produces — as seen in Besançon — are effective methods, too, she argues. The most effective cases tend to provide door-to-door collection systems and have strong communication campaigns, adapting to different demographics such as students, retirees and immigrant communities.

Even in Besançon, which has advised numerous cities across France looking to learn from it, there is plenty of room for improvement.

On average per resident, 23 kilograms of organic waste and 13 kilograms of food waste are still not sorted into separate organic containers every year, instead being put into household garbage and therefore incinerated, says Huot. And a fifth of households living in individual buildings with gardens haven’t bought composters, despite apparently having the space to do so.

Scrolling photos courtesy of Peter Yeung.

Peter Yeung

Peter Yeung is a Contributing Editor at Reasons to be Cheerful. A Paris-based journalist, he also writes for publications including the Guardian, the LA Times and the BBC. He’s filed stories from across Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas.

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