the waste management market | France

1.1 Definition and scope of the market

Waste management covers all operations related to waste from human activity. It concerns the collection, transport, treatment, reuse, elimination or storage of waste. It has a scientific name: rudology, which can be defined as the systematic study of waste.

Global waste production amounted to 2.01 billion tons in 2018. There are, however, great disparities in the origin of this waste, with its production not proportional to the population of the different regions of the world, which shows certain inequalities. In 2018, only 13.5% of this waste was recycled and much of it was dumped in nature and in the oceans, showing the need for waste management on a global scale

In Europe, France is the 2ᵉ country producing the most waste, behind Germany, with 343 million tons in 2018. The management of these millions of tons of waste generates billions of euros in revenue, growing by 11.2% for the European Union and by 21% for France between 2016 and 2018. France, however, saw a 1.2% drop in turnover between 2019 and 2020, heavily impacted by the closure of 95% of its waste collection centres and 60% of its sorting centres during the March 2020 containment.

The current trends of sorting and reducing waste, reinforced by legal incentives such as the AGEC Law of 2020, could change the business, reducing the annual volume of waste, but the know-how needed to deal with new waste such as WEEE and the scarcity of raw materials tend to increase the value of each