With growing awareness for environmental concerns and healthy food production, urban composting is currently booming in France.
In an article for the open-access journal FACTS Reports, Marjorie Tendero, economics professor at ESSCA, and her co-author Carola Guyot Phung, research associate at the Ecole Polytechnique, draw an evidence-based inventory of this ancient practice that is being rejuvenated as a contribution to building the sustainable city of tomorrow.
Mobilising a wealth of data and a series of pertinent illustrations and graphs, the article highlights the ecological benefit that can be drawn from urban composting. But there’s more to it than just an environmentally friendly way of reducing waste production. This practice, whether individual or collective, engages citizens and offers a decentralized response to current challenges in a highly centralized country. Moreover, this practice also renews social bonds in urban neighbourhoods: its success requires making material available in a common space, seeting up a communication system, and gathering support from residents’ initiatives.
« FACTS »stands for « Field Actions Science Reports », and the paper by Marjorie Tendero and Carola Guyot Phung matches perfectly the mission of this highly original international outlet for practice-oriented research that sees itself as a platform for spreading good practices of development actions, aiming at helping international organizations, national agencies and policy-makers communicate best practices and lessons learned through the implementation of their programmes.
Marjorie Tendero, Carola Guyot Phung, « The revival of urban agriculture: an opportunity for the composting stream », Field Actions Science Reports (2019), can be freely accessed and downloaded by following this link: https://journals.openedition.org/factsreports/5682
