Recycling biowaste with mechanical biological treatment technologies: The rise and fall of a socio-technical imaginary

In France, the development of fermentable waste recovery sectors has been shaped by the emergence of so-called “mechanical-biological treatment” facilities – more commonly known as “MBT” plants – throughout the 2000s and 2010s. Promoted by major actors in the waste-management industry, these plants offered a turnkey technological solution capable of sorting and treating fermentable waste while converting it into compost. For local authorities, MBT plants represented a convenient technological fix that eliminated the need to mobilize citizens to adopt source-separation practices. However, this rapid expansion came to a halt in 2015 following the adoption of the Energy Transition for Green Growth Act (LTECV), which, in its Article 70, mandates “the widespread implementation of source separation of bio-waste.” This regulatory shift marked the culmination of a long-standing socio-technical dispute that had set advocates of MBT facilities against detractors for nearly two decades. Beneath this controversy lies a struggle for control over the “socio-technical imaginary” of biowaste recovery. In this paper, I show how the sociotechnical imaginaries associated with these recovery methods were shaped by waste-management stakeholders – specifically, how the imaginary of MBT plants gained traction in the 1990s and early 2000s, only to be subsequently discredited in the years that followed.